June is already over, so technically I have less than six months to reach my reading goals. Still, I thought it would be nice to do a mid-year reading update.
I had a couple of reading goals for this year and I still have to do a lot of work to achieve them.
- To read 50 books (15 read)
- To read 24 TBR books planned for this year (3 read)
- To read 3 books in Japanese and 3 books in Spanish (still have to finish the first one for both languages)
- To participate in the A Game of Tomes book club and read all of the 6 scheduled books (not started yet)
Of the 50 books that I wanted to read this year, I have read 15 so far. The first half year of 2024 went better compared to last year, but I always have some trouble to get into reading at the beginning of the year. Of those 15, I have three favourites and one disappointing book. The disappointing one was The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. It was my first time reading Ellis’ work and maybe I should have started with American Psycho (also on the TBR list for this year!). I did not like the main character or any other characters mentioned in the story; all of them were spoiled rich children with unrealistic lifestyles and unimportant problems. The novel itself was also too long and contained many repetitions. The ending was good though; there I finally got the psychological thriller plot twist that I wanted. It could have been a nice novel if it was half the original size.
The books that I did enjoy are;
- Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
- The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
- Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
So one horror classic and two historical non-fiction are my top reads of this year, at least so far. I’m almost finished with The Brothers Karamazov, and I think it deserves a spot in the favourites list as well; the book contains interesting characters and deep philosophical discussions!
Here are some of my reading statistics from StoryGraph (that’s one of the tools that I use to track my reading):
Most of the read books are below 300 pages. I enjoy shorter books more and I love short stories in general. Long books are sometimes difficult to get through, probably because I’m a mood reader and often don’t feel like reading the same book all the time. I like to switch things up. It used to bother me a lot because I would not start a book before I finished the one I was currently reading. This led to abandoning reading altogether; a reading slump. But since I started reading multiple books simultaneously this problem disappeared.
The majority of my reading consists of fiction, literary and genre fiction. However, this year I also have multiple non-fiction books that I have to read for my thesis or some that I choose to read for fun. Non-fiction books such as The Wager and Spillover read like historical thrillers. Both writers are famous for making history come alive through their storytelling.
As mentioned before, I always have a reading slump at the beginning of the year. In the first three months, I usually try to finish reading the books from the previous year. This year was not as bad as the years before though; I at least read three books. Then in April things started to pick up again. And May was my best reading month so far.
Hopefully, I will be able to complete my reading goals before the end of the year.
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