I'm Sensing a Pattern Here...

A 2024 review in books and a year of messy woman lit

This year, I read 31 books - 33 - if you count what’s currently on my nightstand: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion (Fine, I get the Didion hype!) and “An American Marriage” by Tayari Jones, both of which I’m enjoying. Influenced by #booktok, I started logging the number of books I read at the beginning of the year and setting up my own rating system. It felt important (and fun) to note what type of books I gravitated towards, and which ones I actually liked.

can we talk about “Piglet?”

“Little Rot” was erotic…and disturbing. I also need to talk to someone about this book.

Books I loved and couldn’t get out of my head weeks after reading, received three hearts. Books I liked, received two hearts or one, and books I couldn’t finish or had very predictable plot points, weren’t rated. Please note, that this is a very arbitrary critique. I am no critic. Therefore, just know that all of this is just…

~ my opinion ~

The mix of books on my list leaned fiction vs. nonfiction, and most were novels sitting dusty on my bookshelf for years, with a few 2024 bestsellers sprinkled in for relevancy. But the pattern was clear. I gravitated towards books with protagonists going through crises (plural) and are hell-bent on unraveling their lives even further, often having some emotional/physical affair in the process. I LOVE MESS. But I’m so tired of this genre that reads the same no matter the age, profession, hometown, single/married status etc of the usually [white] woman unraveling. With that said, I have to ask myself, do I really gravitate towards this genre, or are the marketing minds at Simon & Schuster working overtime?

I think I know the answer.

Anyway, here are a few of my dEeP tHougHts…

three hearts

These three-heart books reminded me why I love to read. “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi is a beautiful (beautiful) book tracing the 300-year lineage of two half-sisters, one who lives in Ghana and the other who is enslaved and brought to America. It’s a “Great American” novel that should absolutely be read in schools.

I’m late to reading “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus, but I fell in love with the humor and quirkiness of the main protagonist; a woman chemist in the 1960s who becomes the host of a cooking show. I couldn’t describe this book with one word if I tried, and that’s why I loved it.

“Bright Young Women” by Jessica Knoll is a novel inspired by the real-life murders of Florida State University sorority sisters in the 1970s at the hands of serial killer, Ted Bundy. This book tells the perspective of the women and the lives lost - and altered - by these killings. I couldn’t put this book down until I finished it. It was suspenseful and terrifying while also being, idk, tender? Can you describe a book as tender that involves murder?

two hearts

As much as I didn’t want to like “All Fours," by Miranda July I did enjoy the author’s writing about a wife and mother in perimenopause who decides to take a cross-country road trip from LA to NYC, but instead shacks up in a motel just outside of LA for a few weeks and has an existential crisis and an affair with a 20-something aspiring breakdancer. The story was wild, and what I ultimately liked about the book was its unpredictability. I never knew what hijinks this character would involve herself in, and for that, two stars. But I couldn’t help but think I’ve read this book before (minus the 20-something breakdancer); I know this character. Why do we like reading about messy women on the brink of collapse?

Bret Easton Ellis, the author behind “The Shards,” “American Psycho” and “Less Than Zero” wrote one hell of a book about a serial killer wreaking havoc amongst a group of LA prep school kids in the 1980s. Bret is a bona-fide freak - and I say that as a compliment - who puts his characters through the psychological and physical ringer. Naturally, this was my book before bed.

“The Last House on Needless Street” by Catriona Ward is another horror/thriller book about a…

SERIAL KILLER and a missing girl. Clearly, this is my new genre, and if my love for the TV show, Law & Order SVU proves anything, it’s this.

This book has twists that you will never see coming. A real thriller.

---

In 2025, I hope to read more thrillers, work in some sci-fi or fantasy, and sit down with a few classic novels I had no business reading before my frontal lobe developed.

Recommendations always appreciated.