2024: My Bumper Bookish Year

Two of the many tsundokus fighting for my future attention

In 2009 I read five books all year; in 2024 I read 55! The difference being of course that back then I was working, and almost all my reading was confined to briefs on the next work project, and going over my interview write ups. It has taken me several years in fact to finally accept that I am "retired" - it's been a slow, subliminal descent into "economic inactivity" - to use the Government's thinly disguised pejorative - due to structural changes in my field of industrial market research, compounded by the pandemic, and my own ill health in 2022.

The upside of this is the newfound freedom to read whenever I want, and not just on holiday, say. Even now, I still feel a bit guilty sitting down with a book in the middle of the day, and am more comfortable reading at mealtimes or in the bath, when it counts as multi-tasking. Or in bed at night, when it counts as a form of sleep hygiene.

They're big, but not clever.

I thought I would share the list of what I read in 2024, as it would give me vicarious pleasure to think of someone else enjoying a book as much as I did. My favourite genre is the psychological thriller, and I deliberately despatched a lot of those so I could give them away afterwards and clear some much needed space. As you can see from these photos, the tsundokus are taking over the front room. The flaw in my grand plan is that for every thriller I gave away, I'd see four more I fancied in a charity shop, so it is very much a case of one step forwards and four back. One day I may get a grip, and resist the allure of the bargain book, but between charity shop browsing and online purchases of used copies, that day may not come anytime soon.

Tsundoku containers that slide neatly under a chair

Here and there I have consciously interspersed my usual fictional fare with what I perceive as a more "highbrow" or worthy tome, the 600+ page literary biography of Ted Hughes being the most obvious example of that. I did enjoy it, but it was very densely written and required a great deal of focus and commitment. I fear social media has atomised my attention span to the point where I am finding it harder to concentrate on a more challenging read. This year I will try to stretch myself again with more of these "difficult" books, perhaps with the allegedly easiest novel by Virginia Woolf, "The Years", or Hilary Mantel's memoir. I have left them in a prominent position on the coffee table to motivate me into picking them up.

Same tsundoku from another angle

I shan't give the books from last year (none of which feature in the photos) stars or ratings of any kind, not least because I can't remember what some of them were about. I don't know if this is an age thing, but due to creeping cognitive decline of some sort I forget the plot of books almost as soon as I have read the ending - it can even occur when I am only part way through, haha, if there are numerous strands to the action or it has been a while since I last picked the book up. So I have decided to mark in bold type the 15 books I distinctly remember enjoying very much and would highly recommend. There will surely have been others, but 15 is a good number to settle on.

Under sofa stash, not even in a container!

And oh look - two books called "Trespass"!

2024

Robyn Harding - The Party

James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

Jonathan Coe - The House of Sleep

Lucy Atkins - The Night Visitor

Penelope Lively - How it All Began

Jean Ray - La Cité de l'Indicible Peur

Lucy Atkins - Magpie Lane

Michael Mosley - 4 Weeks to Better Sleep

Lucy Atkins - The Other Child

Rosie Walsh - The Man Who Didn't Call

Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

C L Taylor - Sleep

J P Delaney - The Girl Before

Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Terry Darlington - Narrow Dog to Indian River**

Arlene Hunt - While She Sleeps

Rose Tremain - Trespass

Tony Hawks - A Piano in the Pyrenees

Harry Bingham - Talking to the Dead

Catherine Cooper - The Château

Alex Michaelides - The Silent Patient

Nicci French - Saturday Requiem

Catherine Cooper - The Chalet

Jon Ronson - Lost at Sea

Lucy Atkins - Windmill Hill

Paul Magrs - Puss in Books

Shaun Bythell - The Diary of a Bookseller

Michael Mosley - Covid-19

Kate Atkinson - Big Sky

Monica Heisy - really good, actually

Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop

Jonathan Bate - Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

Sarah Rayne - The Murderer inside the Mirror

Sally Vickers - The Librarian

Stig Abell - Death under a Little Sky

Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club

Louise Kennedy - Trespass

Erin Kelly - The Skeleton Key

Terry Darlington - Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier**

Hannah Jane Parkinson - The Joy of Small Things

Minette Walters - The Echo

Barbara Pym - Some Tame Gazelle

Peter Mayle - A Year in Provence (a re-read)

Jane Shilling - The Stranger in the Mirror (a re-read)

Hillary Waugh - Last Seen Wearing

Ursula Parrott - Ex-Wife

Peter Mayle - My Twenty-Five Years in Provence

Lisa Jewell - None of This is True

Nick Pettigrew - Anti-Social

Lucy Foley - The Guest List

Celia Imrie - Not Quite Nice

Cathy Kelly - Other Women

Lizzy Barber - My Name is Anna

Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Linda Green - While my Eyes were Closed

Bag for life temporary accommodation

I should say I enjoyed everything I read, and there were no "DNF"s. The last time I did that was with a biography of Coco Chanel, a fact of which I am not proud, but there was just too much detail about Russian ballet dancers. (Click on the link for a photo of yet another bookcase!)

I would have done a collage of all the books in my "Top 15", but I am not sure I could readily find them, and some I have since lent out, or left in France (where there is another bookcase, and more piles). There are three other bookcases in this house that aren't pictured here, which are largely full of unread titles . ;)

Have you any good books to recommend from your recent reading? 

Not that I should be encouraged to acquire any more, obviously, but there's always the library...

Another bag for life full

**The author, Terry Darlington, was my old boss at Research Associates, and the reason I relocated to The Midlands nearly 40 years ago. The Wigan Pier book is especially autobiographical, and there are even references to a couple of projects I worked on, and a vague reference to "female staff".

My tsundoku shame, and thoughts on blogging, and being a backwards burrowing bookworm

I am interrupting my planned cat and loosely 'perfume'-related post - so loose that the 'p' word has to be couched in inverted commas - plus I can't be technically 'interrupting' a post I hadn't started writing - to bring you some shock news about my book reading rate in the past 8 years, which also happens to be getting on for the time I have been blogging. I keep a 'book diary', you see, in which I write the year and month when I finish each title I read, so the data is there in all its inglory, which if it wasn't a word before, is now.

The topline is that in those 8 years I have read a paltry 48 books, or 6 per year on average. The rate varies between 1 book in 2012 (when I split up with Mr Bonkers and moved house) to 12 in 2015, for reasons that are not immediately apparent.

I posted this alarming statistic on Facebook, and two friends replied, one of whom has a speed reading rate that would blow me out of the water!

"56 pages an hour is my average rate. 12 hours a week is also a good average. 100 books a year allowing for 336 pages per book."

I love the precision of '336 pages'...that figure didn't come out of nowhere either, I sense, ditto '56 pages an hour'. I don't know for sure, but have a feeling my hourly rate might be nearer 20 pages. Plus there is the whole issue of print size and line height. I own some books which I think I might fancy reading, but as soon as I open them and see how densely covered in tiny type the pages are, I promptly shut them again, however engrossing they might otherwise be!

I don't watch much TV - or DVDs - either!

Another friend, who is a short story writer, posted:

"31 so far this year for me, thanks to having joined the FB group Read 100 books in 2017. Unlikely I'll manage the full 100, though."

So whilst not as voracious a bookworm as the first friend, she is still managing to read my annual average in a month, near as dammit.

I scratched my head for a while, puzzling at the massive disparity between these friends' reading rates and my own, before it dawned on me that blogging throughout that period will have accounted for a fair chunk of time...probably something of the order of 3,500 hours at a guess, which equates to two years in 'working week' terms, assuming no holiday allowance. But that still leaves the other six, haha, so further factors must also be at work.

For example, I recently discovered that I suffer from dry eye syndrome, and I do definitely struggle more with my eyesight for close work, despite having been told my prescription hasn't really changed in recent years. I don't own a pair of reading glasses as such, mind, and could probably do with one. For now, I am using an old pair of distance glasses from 15 years ago, which are not a bad substitute! And there was also the trouble with my old bath, which never seemed to keep the water hot for more than about five minutes, an ambient temperature not exactly conducing to a 'wallow and read' habit.

Then just this morning, it occurred to me to see if I had kept any records prior to 2008, and sure enough I had...all the way back to 2002 in fact. I got the idea off my late mother, about the meaning of whose system of ticks and crosses we can but speculate. She also noted where she got the tip off from to read a particular book, which ranges from The Times, to the 'S.T' - which I am going to assume is The Sunday Times - to The Oldie and The Spectator - plus occasional mentions of me!

Mother's book diary

And the upshot of my analysis of my own previous book diary is as revealing as it is concerning. In the 7 years between 2002 and 2008 I read 157 books(!), equating to 22.5 a year, versus my 6 a year nowadays. That is almost four times as many. And I was working A LOT more than I do today. I could imagine I got through a good few books on my trips away, in the absence of any human interaction. And also on those kind of beach-y holidays I don't take anymore.

So that is all rather sobering to put it mildly. Ironically, the fact that I read so little - I don't even take a newspaper now, which used to occupy entire weekends back in the day - doesn't seem to stop me buying books. ;) Why, only yesterday I bagged four for just over a fiver in Oxfam: two first editions, a Helen Dunmore that was new to me (in honour of her recent demise), and a Louise Doughty (on the premise that anything written by the author of the incomparable Apple Tree Yard simply had to be worth a punt!).

This compulsion to buy books is a trait I inherited from my father. At his death, he was virtually entombed by books in his tiny flat: they were piled high in the middle of the living room like the footings of an unfinished building, and the floor to ceiling bookcases in every room were double or triple stacked. There were books under the bed and in the bathroom, and none of the doors opened more than a crack because of a book-related obstruction lurking immediately behind. His library ended up filling 140 large cardboard removal boxes, which are in my brother's attic, still largely waiting to be sorted and sold, and are one of the subjects of this post from last September.

Source: fet.uwe.ac.uk

So yes, I am my father's daughter, and have tsundokus dotted all over the house, even if none of the gangways are impeded as such. ;) I regularly break them up into smaller piles so as not to frighten the horses, but the house is silting up with unread books all the same. I tell myself I will read them when I am retired, even though the government keeps moving the glimmering mirage of the state pension further off into the far distance. Hey, I have so little work at the moment that I am semi-retired already. Make that three quarters-retired even! And still I don't read.

No, I think the reason for my woeful book reading rate is partly the blogging, for sure, but it will also have a lot to do with social media and my propensity to fritter away time, and make a meal - and heavy weather! - of the simplest of chores. I have taken time wasting to the rarefied level of an Olympian sport. They say that mothers of new borns are the most productive people of all, getting more done in the odd 15 minutes they can snatch while the baby is napping than people like me achieve in a week.

And to make matters worse, I joined Instagram last week! I agree that the steady procession of arty photos people post on there is pleasingly restful, but I still prefer the verbal cut and thrust of Facebook, and I could never ever reconcile myself to that annoying thicket of hashtags. So I may not be on there for long...


I would be really interested to know what your reading rates are like, and whether they have changed lately.

If so, what do you put that down to? 

Some of these are admittedly hotel guides and dictionaries

Me, I am off to start 'The Trouble With Goats and Sheep', by Joanna Cannon, which was a birthday present from my friend Gillie. In a surprise turn of events, Joanna is helping out at her Alzheimer's choir group. I don't know what has brought her to Stafford.

Now I would lie in the sun for a bit, but I have 100 chemical and cosmetic allergens taped to my back, and the nurse was most insistent that I 'stay cool!'. Hopefully this will confirm the source of my eyelid eczema and may well prompt a further post on the matter.