A classic kind of Poirot mystery, this time for Christmas! He and his trusty friend Catchpool are convinced by Catchpool's fairly unpleasant mother to come to a crumbling manor by the sea a few days before Christmas to help the family solve a murder to prevent a murder. Of course there are many secrets and revelations and red herrings along the way. I would have preferred slightly more Christmas in this story, but it's twisty in the Christie style, and I enjoyed reading it.
Grade: B
I liked this one better than the other romance I read by this author this month! I can't say that I completely recommend it, but this is a pretty charming romance between a twenty-something gamer and his older brother's high school best friend who he's always had a crush on. The crush comes back home and helps out the siblings with their family business over the holidays (a subplot I truly could have done without), and sparks fly, etc. It was fine!
Grade: B
Sigh, another Christmas romance that's...fine, I guess? This is somehow the third fake dating storyline within the same series, where one of the guys in the fake romance is the son/stepson of the fake romance guys of the first novel. At a certain point, you'd think that people would catch on! It's inoffensive but doesn't offer a lot more than that, unfortunately.
Grade: C
I keep trying gay romances by this author, because they wrote a couple of romances I read a while ago that I remember liking a lot, and then I end up disappointed. This one is about a retired naval investigator in his early 40s who meets a really hot 23 year old at a gay bar, only to discover that he's the son of one of his high school friends, oh no! And also the 23 year old is going to be living with him in his old victorian house that he inherited from his aunt, and also there's a...mystery to be solved? And it's a whole forbidden romance thing that both wants to be a massive problem and something that's easily overcome, and I don't know! It didn't really work for me, even though I like a lot of age gap romances and I'm not opposed to a fantasy narrative about restoring a house together and finding love. So far I haven't found a book this year that really hits.
Grade: C
Another catch up Christmas novel! This book should be right up my alley, and instead it's one that has a pretty interesting conceit that just completely falls apart. It's about two best friends from college who both don't have good family options for Christmas, so they create their own Christmas tradition. But at some point, there's a huge falling out between them, leaving their other orphan friends in a difficult situation, and the narrative shifts back and forth through time and shows various Christmases of the past so the reader can piece together what happened. However, the falling out doesn't really land, and while I'm not opposed to stories about people in their twenties making bad social decisions, the particular choices here just made me wonder why any of them are actually friends. Deeply meh.
Grade: C
Yes, it is January and yes, I am still making my way through my Christmas books from 2023! This is a deeply mediocre romance novel about a woman who goes through a groundhog day of her holiday vacation with her immediate family and the family friends they've done Christmas with her entire life. But this might be the final year at the vacation home they all go to, and she hooked up with the wrong pseudo-cousin who's not actually a cousin, and of course she's stuck in a dead-end job and is afraid to tell anyone what's happening! So she gets a million chances to fix it all, and finally does. This wouldn't have been good no matter what, but it especially suffers in comparison with the Hallmark Hanukkah groundhog day movie that came out in 2023, Round and Round, which is legitimately great and shows how a time loop really should be done.
Grade: C
Well, somehow we've reached my ninth year of publishing this book blog! If that sounds like an improbably long time to you, it feels even more wild to me, since I persist in thinking about this blog as being my 'new' thing. However, it's also true that we've cycled back to another presidential election year, which was the entire impetus behind its creation in 2016 - a method of anxiety moderation. I can't say I actually know how much help or harm focusing on my reading list provided that year, or in 2020 for that matter, but I do know that I continue to value having a place to write about the things I read that's not part of a whole commerce system where my opinions on books will be added to a rating aggregate. I completely understand the value to authors (and potentially readers) of those ratings, but I like not having to consider those things when I give books fairly arbitrary grades.
Anyway, this is a list of books I currently own or have out from the library that I have never read before and that I want to attempt to read this year. It continues to be a pretty weird assortment of books I've owned for a decade plus, newish releases that I'm already behind on, and other titles I come across and decide need to be added to the pile, along with my book club books. As always, I would like to read all of them in 2024, but my secondary (and more realistic) goals are to read at least 52 books, and to start 2025 with a smaller list than I have right now. Of course, that would require me to not add new books to my reading pile, and we all know how well that's gone over the past 8 years. And the real goal is to read a bunch of books that I love and that I want to tell other people about. So here's hoping I can achieve that one if nothing else!
