All the Books I Read In September

 When we left off, 27 days ago, I was at 38 books for the year out of my goal of 52. Since then, football season started, I got back into a regular treadmill routine, and I went out of town for a long weekend, and all of this added up to a ton more books.

39/52: Survive the Night by Riley Sager: Charlie needs a ride home from campus back to Ohio for the December break, and Josh is putting up a poster on the ride board right when she is. Happy coincidence, right? But there's something a little off about Josh. He won't show Riley the inside of the trunk. His story keeps changing and is full of holes. He seems determined to drive her somewhere, very quickly, and Riley starts to wonder if maybe, in leaving campus, she hasn't quite left the Campus Killer who murdered her roommate behind. This was suspenseful and twisty and very enjoyable.

40 and 41/52: Goal Lines and First Times and Line Mates and Study Dates, by Eden Finley and Saxon James: The last two books in the college hockey gay romance series I was reading. Again, they're pretty much the same book over and over, but they were very entertaining on the treadmill. Maybe I should go back and finish the 50 Shades trilogy.

42/52: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: Ten years ago, four American Indian men slaughtered a herd of elk on land reserved for the tribal elders, and left the carcasses to rot. Now, something is coming back for them and their families, looking for revenge. This was a little different, but still good and spooky.

43/52: Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon: Nathan and Oliver seem to have it all: a dog, a townhouse, a happy relationship, but when Oliver visits Haus, a gay bathhouse, while Nathan is out of town, things go horribly awry and Oliver barely gets out alive. Now he's caught in a game with a killer, and his lies are stacking up and about to topple. Can he save himself, his family, and the perfect life they've built? And will he want to? The tone of this book reminded me a lot of Scott Smith's books, where one thing goes wrong and bad choices keep stacking up the problems. It was a good read.

44/52: Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco: Amazon suggested I read this, and since I've seen the movie a bunch of times I figured why not read it? A small family gets out of New York City for the summer by renting a vacation home that seems too good to be true. The sprawling mansion upstate rents for the entire summer for less than a month of their apartment, and the only caveat is that they must bring food upstairs every day for the lady of the house, who keeps to her room and won't be any trouble at all. It's a slow burner, but a decently distracting read. 

45/52: The Suicide House by Charlie Donlea: Deep in the woods on the grounds of an elite prep school is the Suicide House, an old former faculty residence that the students now sneak into for late night parties. A year ago, a teacher murdered two students in the Suicide House, and now the other students on campus keep returning to it to kill themselves. What's happening at the prep school, and what does it have to do with a mysterious secret student society on campus? Is there a way to win the game, and survive? This was a decent mystery, but deeply exploring all the personality quirks of the various police distracted from the plot more than it enhanced it.

46/52: Fledgling by Octavia Butler: An interesting vampire novel with an uncomfortable undercurrent of pedophilia. Based on how the novel unfolds, you can argue that it's not pedophilia, but putting your vampire in the body of a preteen and having it have sex with multiple adults sure looks like pedophilia. The novel, like I said, is interesting, but there's a strong undercurrent of uncomfortable. 

47/52: Haunted City by Joy Dickinson: Subtitled "An Unauthorized Guide to Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice" there's a lot of meticulously researched history in here but not a lot of Anne Rice. If you want a building by building history of every structure in the French Quarter of New Orleans, this is the book for you. If you want discussion beyond a sentence or two of how these buildings and locations shaped Rice's most famous works, then you should pass on this.

48/52: In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle: Claudio lives alone, by choice, in a hillside estate in Calabria. His only regular contact with others is his weekly delivery from the mailman, and he likes it that way. Claudio's peaceful days of writing poems and caring for his animals are interrupted when he receives a strange visitor: a pregnant unicorn chooses his farm to give birth. A chance sighting during the mail delivery leaks Claudio's news to the world, and his solitude is broken by reporters, gawkers, helicopters, and other, more sinister forces. Can he protect his life and the life of the unicorn from the overwhelming attention of a world looking for a miracle? This was short, but thoughtful.

49/52: More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera: Adam Silvera will break your heart. I know this each time I pick up an Adam Silvera book, but I read them anyway, because they're good, but they'll break your heart. In this one, Aaron struggles to recover from his father's suicide, and his own attempt soon after. His girlfriend and his friends are trying to help, but he's also growing closer to Thomas, a new boy in the neighborhood, and conflicted about his feelings toward Thomas. With so many things making him unhappy, Aaron wonders if the controversial new memory-altering procedure from the Leteo Institute is what he really needs to find happiness, by wiping away everything that troubles him.

50/52: Killing Is My Business by Adam Christopher: This is the second book in Christopher's "Ray Electromatic" series, featuring the robot private detective of the same name, who is also sometimes a robot assassin. Ray's dual roles have him playing both sides of the same case in this book, which moves very quickly. I breezed through it in an afternoon, but it was still atmospheric and fun.

51/52: I'd Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald: As I read these 18 lost and previously unpublished stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I got the sense that I'd read them before, and think maybe I did read the hardcover when it came out. Ether way, most of them are still a good read if you like Fitzgerald.

52/52: More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth: This memoir felt like it was missing something. Welteroth is most famous for being the first woman of color to be named editor in chief of "Teen Vogue", but the book seems really scant on covering that part of her life. I was surprised to see that this won awards, but hey, good for Elaine Welteroth, I guess.

A lot of books

It's been a really long time since I shared a book list, and they've just kind of stacked up, so I'm going to roll right in without a lot of preamble. 

24/52: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: I probably should have read this twice, but instead just went through a really slow reading where I'd absorb, think, go read some more, absorb, think, and go read some more again. It took me a surprising amount of time to read what is essentially a short book, but it was time well spent.

25/52: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager: I'm really enjoying Riley Sager's brand of horror. In this one, Maggie returns to the house where she lived as a child, and where her father claims they were tormented by demons and the ghosts of the family that was killed there. He turned the story into a best selling book that Maggie has spent her whole life trying not to live under, and now that he's dead, she wants answers. But what if the answers are that the book is actually true?

HALFWAY/52: Divas, Dames, and Daredevils by Mike Madrid: An exploration of the lost female heroes from the Golden Age of comics, I found this somewhat disappointing. Each chapter has a full comic story reprinted, in some cases two, but were somewhat light on comics history or a discussion of what these characters meant in the long run, what else they influenced, or why we should remember them now.

27/52: They Never Came Home by Lois Duncan: I found this on my bookcase, and like most of Duncan's books it's a solid suspense novel for the age group. Reading them when older, you notice a little more that the story often depends on a lot of coincidences. In this one, Joan copes with grief after her boyfriend and her brother vanish on a hike in the mountains together. What happened to them? Where did they go? And why didn't they ever come back?

28/52: The Darkness Outside of Us by Eliot Scrafer: Ambrose and Kodiak are teenaged astronauts from rival nations, forced together into a joint rescue mission, and they have a lot of questions. Why don't they remember the launch? Why does their ship show signs of other people having been inside? And why are they picking up radio transmission from earth that don't match the information they're receiving from mission command? The two of them have to work together to figure things out and survive, but can they?

29/52: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas: Yadriel's family summons and speaks to ghosts, but Yadriel has never been able to participate because he is trans, and his family constantly pushes him toward the traditionally female role instead. When his cousin goes missing and is assumed dead, Yadriel takes the chance to prove himself by summoning his cousin, but instead summons Julian, the leather jacket bad boy of his high school. Now the two of them have to work together to figure out what happened to Julian and to Yad's cousin, because Yadriel's whole family is in danger.

30/52: We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper: When Becky Cooper was an undergraduate at Harvard, she heard the whispered rumor about the anthropology grad student who was murdered in her apartment, her death scene ritualistically staged and a rising star professor suspected of the killing before Harvard covered up the investigation. Eventually she discovers that the murder was real, and spends years investigating the case, the suspects, the victim, and what it means to become a story instead of a person. I'll go ahead and spoil that the killer is discovered at the end, so the book isn't incomplete, but by the time you find out who the murderer was it may not matter anymore.

31/52: What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera: Arthur and Ben have an adorable meet-cute at the post office, but is that all they're destined for? What if their attempts at first dates keep falling apart? Are they meant to be together in a classic New York City love story, or are they just two guys who bumped into each other? This was very cute, and an enjoyable read.

32/52: Utopia Drive by Erik Reece: This road trip through America's mostly failed utopian communities should have been interesting, but reads like a textbook. I really wanted to like this, but it was a slog to get through.

33/52: The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman: In the same way you know what you're getting when you open a Mary Higgins Clark or Tom Clancy novel, you know what you're getting with Carol Goodman: endangered woman with a complicated past, central New York location that's referred to as upstate because it's above Westchester but really there's like seven more hours of New York state above it where the actual real upstate is, and at least one secret baby per novel. They're still interesting, and fun reads.

34/52: The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch: Sky Baker is openly gay in high school, but doing his best to be invisible and just get through his four years. At the same time, he wants to invite his crush, Ali, to prom, but his plans are shattered when a homophobic email about him goes viral at school. Now, all eyes are on Sky and he only has 30 days to decide if he's going to fight back or vanish quietly away.

35/52: Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell: In the final book of the Simon Snow trilogy, we say goodbye, but what does that mean? What happens after the chosen one and his friends graduate from magical school and have to be adults? Where do they go? What do they do? And who do they want to be? This was a long goodbye, but a good one.

36 nd 37/52: Power Plays and Straight A's and Face Offs and Cheap Shots by Eden Finley and Saxon James: I am reading this quartet of books on the kindle while I treadmill. It was recommended to me by Amazon as a gay romance, and... yeah. So far the books are pretty similar: there's at least one hockey player who accidentally falls in love with another guy, who may also be a hockey player, and I'm not sure how Amazon classifies "romance" or what happens in straight people romance books, but all of a sudden there are a lot of parts going in a lot of places in extensive detail and should I have been more of a hockey fan in college?

38/52: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix: They are the Final Girls, the sole survivors of various massacres, and they meet regularly for group with their therapist until the day that one of them doesn't come to group, because she's dead. And then they're all in some sort of trouble, and threats are coming from all sides. Someone is out to kill the Final Girls, but is it someone from outside, or someone they've shared all their secrets with all along?

All Five Books I Read in April

 I didn't read quite as many books in April as I did in March, which is odd since I read an extremely long book in March, but I also did a lot more outside walking instead of treadmill walking, so I didn't read as much on the Kindle as I did in the colder months. Still, I finished five books, which puts me almost at the halfway mark for the year, so it's not like I've fallen behind.

Also, oddly, I seem to have accidentally had a theme for the month, which was thriller/horror. Two of the books were from the same author, though, so maybe not that surprising.

Anyway...

19/52: In Later, by Stephen King, Jamie is a young teen who sees dead people. They tell him things if he asks them questions, but his single mother has convinced him that he needs to keep his gift to himself, and he does until they day they have to use it to survive. Now a policewoman who knows his secret draws him into a confrontation with a dead serial killer, but the dead can't really hurt you, unless it turns out that they can.  This was a fast read, but a good one. Stephen King wrote some real clunkers for a few years there *stares in Dreamcatcher* but his recent ones have mostly been good, and a return to his classic level.

20/52: In Laurie Elizabeth Flynn's The Girls Are All So Nice Here, the girls are not actually that nice at Ambrosia's ten year college reunion. Instead, they have questions, which they've had all along since the night during freshman year when Amb was involved in some sort of incident that unfolds during flashbacks. Somebody wants to know what happened that night, and what happened leading up to it, but Ambrosia doesn't want to share, especially when it becomes clear that someone doesn't just want the truth. They also want revenge. 

This was a pretty good book, but I was irritated by one thing: it's not clear at the beginning who died on the fateful night, and this is obscured throughout the first half of the book. That's not what I object to, though. Part of the way the death is concealed is that one of the people Ambrosia describes seeing at the reunion isn't actually there. Ambrosia is seeing her face on memorial posters. It feels like a cheap trick rather than a plot twist to keep saying you see someone's staring eyes, but then once the flashbacks reveal they're dead to start adding, "On the memorial posters all over campus". 

21/52: I could not stop reading Riley Sager's Lock Every Door. Jules, broken up with and also broke, takes a job as an apartment sitter in one of Manhattan's most famous buildings, the Bartholomew. Jules is excited to move into the setting of one of her favorite novels, even more so when she finds out that the author of the book still lives there. Broke and needing this job, Jules ignores the stories about the building, but why isn't she allowed to tell anyone she's living there? Why are the residents so secretive and standoffish? What happened to Ingrid, the apartment sitter from downstairs who moved out in the middle of the night and can't be reached? And what happened to the apartment sitter before Jules? Will Jules figure out what's happening at the Bartholomew, or will she be the next story posted online in the middle of the night? Like I said, I could not stop reading this, and plowed through it in a weekend.

22/52: In Camilla Sten's The Lost Village, Alice and three friends travel to a remote Swedish mining town to spend a week filming a documentary on the famous "lost village". In 1959, everyone in Silvertjarn vanished, including Alice's grandmother's entire family, and the mystery has haunted Alice for her entire life. As soon as they arrive, though, things start to go wrong. Are they accidents? The supernatural? Sabotage from within the film crew itself? Or something none of them could have guessed? Alice is determined to find the secret of the lost village, but it may be the last thing she finds. This book was translated from the author's native language, so it can feel a little bit stilted at times, but that also just adds to the feeling of weirdness and things being just a little bit off kilter that pervades the tone of the book. I really enjoyed this.

23/52: I ended up grabbing the other Riley Sager book on my unread shelf, The Last Time I Lied, because I enjoyed the first one so much, and I enjoyed this one, too. During Emma's very first summer at Camp Nightingale, she got put into a cabin with three older girls. Adopted as a kind of younger sister by Vivian, the group leaders, Emma follows her cabinmates everywhere, right up until the night the three of them vanish into the woods and are never seen again. That night haunts Emma and her work as a painter for the next fifteen years, so when she is invited to return to a newly reopened Camp Nightingale as an art instructor, she takes the chance to find out what happened to her friends and finally close that chapter of her life. Someone else has returned to camp, though, someone who knows the truth and doesn't want Emma to find out, someone who will be more than happy to make Emma disappear, too. I really liked this book, too, although I read it a little slower than the one before it.

Coming up in May: I don't know. More books?

All the books I read in March

 I didn't realize that I'd forgotten to write up the books I read in March until this morning when I finished a book and thought, "Why is that stack of books still on the coffee table?" 

Ooops.

I'm pleased to report that I am already way ahead for the year. To hit 52, I only need to read a book a week, four a month more or less, but at the end of February I was already at 11 books for the year and now I'm even further ahead, so I feel comfortable saying I've shaken off the slow reading slump I fell into at the beginning of the pandemic, and am back to a more normal speed for me. It bodes well for hitting my goal.

Anyway, here's how March went:

12/52 - Modelland, by Tyra Banks, is probably going to count as the worst book I read this year, and is honestly in the running for the worst book I've ever read. It's hard to pick out, specifically, what's wrong with it but in broad strokes the world-building is inconsistent, Banks can't decide what the tone of the book should be, and the plot is often just dull.

13/52 - Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz, was fascinating, and I couldn't stop reading it. Newitz travels to four ancient cities, participating in archeological digs and interviewing the archeologists themselves, to tell the reader how the cities rose, how the common people in them lived, and how a city becomes "lost", if it really can at all. Travelling to Catalhuyuk, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, Newitz explores why people began to live in cities and why they still do, and writes in a way that makes it fully accessible to non-archeologist readers. 

14/52 - I didn't realize that You Don't Own Me, by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke, was part of a series, as it reads like a stand alone mystery. I'll definitely want to look for the others, though, because this was a sharp, quick, entertaining read. Laurie, producer of a true crime show, is investigating Kendra, widow of a murdered doctor. While Kendra is obviously keeping secrets, do they have anything to do with the man following Laurie who almost kills her? And if Kendra didn't kill her husband, who did? And what will they do to stop Laurie from finding out and broadcasting it to the world? Like I said, this was solid entertainment.

15/52 - Do You Dream of Terra Two?, by Temi Oh, is a long book, but a fast, absorbing science fiction story. Terra Two is an earth-like planet in a nearby solar system, and ten astronauts are going to leave on a 23 year mission to fly there and begin colonization for the waves of people who will come after them. Four are veterans of the space program and colonization of Mars, and six are teenagers who have trained for this mission for most of their lives. They think they're ready, but a tragedy just before launch casts a shadow over a mission that isn't going exactly as planned. Will they still reach Terra Two? And will they even want to? This book and "Four Lost Cities" are tied for best book I read this month.

16/52 - Ararat, by Christopher Golden, is a fast-reading horror novel. An earthquake on Mount Ararat opens a cave that's been sealed for thousands of years, and competing teams of archeologists rush to be the first inside to explore the wooden ship inside. Believing they've found the remains of Noah's Ark, the archeologists waste no time prying open the sarcophagus they find on the lowest level, but discover the mummy of horned, inhuman creature rather than a lost prophet. Now, as a storm descends on the mountain, the archeologists, their documentary crew, and a UN science team are trapped in a cave filled with secrets and something that wants to be sure they never leave. This was a fairly standard horror novel, and would probably be fine as a distraction for a trip or vacation.

17/52 - Admission, by Julie Buxbaum, is a novel about the recent College Admissions Scandal, and tells the story of the family of a former sitcom star who tries to buy her daughter's way into college and is totally not Lori Loughlin even though she totally is Lori Loughlin. This was well written, and asks some hard questions about wealth and privilege, but it's a little too sympathetic toward the perpetrators for my taste.

18/52 - Standard Hollywood Depravity, by Adam Christopher, is really more of a novella than a novel. It's another entry in his Ray Electromatic mystery series about the last robot in Los Angeles, who works both as a private detective and as an assassin for hire. Ray has arrived at a club in Hollywood to kill one of the dancers, but the club is full of gangsters and the dancer isn't who she seems. What else is going on, and can Ray turn it to his advantage, or will he find himself in over his head and out of batteries before he can wrap everything up? This was entertaining, but I think I read it in one sitting.

So, that's it for March. I thought I'd read eight books, but it turns out that I can't actually count.

The Books I Read In February

 I started out strong in January, knocking out seven books in a month, but I did not maintain that pace in February. I don't really have a reason why, other than it being warm and me walking outside more instead of treadmilling, but I still finished a decent four books. One a week is better than a lot of people accomplish, and still keeps me on track for hitting 52 this year.

8/52 - Kristen Biggs and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Undead - When Gatsby passed into the public domain this year, it was only a matter of time before we started getting prequels, tie ins, and reimaginings, and this was one of the first out of the gate. Imagine if, in addition to his secret past and the mystery of how he got his wealth, Jay Gatsby had another, even deadlier secret. Imagine if Jay Gatsby was a vampire.

This wasn't as bad as it sounds. Biggs manages to keep the melodrama under control, and once you get past the absurdity of scenes like Jay Gatsby breaking into an asylum in the middle of the night and just embrace the story, this turns out to be a decent little vampire adventure. It even managed to have a few surprising twists.

9/52 - Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr's Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune - I guess I was on a "big mansions and tragic reversals of fortune" kick, because I started reading this after letting it sit for seven years on my unread books shelf. (It's not even the book that's been there the longest.) I remember buying this because it sounded interesting and because a coworker's husband was distantly related to the Clark family. The Clarks are mostly forgotten, but the family founder was a copper mining magnate and peer of the Rockefellers and Carnegies, and this book tells the story of his youngest daughter, who withdrew from society completely in the 1950s but maintained houses across the country.

From a historical perspective, this was interesting, but the overall story is also somewhat sad. Huguette's money seems to have made her happy, but she definitely seems to have been taken advantage of by her caretakers in her final years, something that happens to a lot of older people. 

10/52 - Karen M. McManus's The Cousins - Continuing on my rich people, big houses, and mysterious pasts kick, I read this tale of the Story family on the treadmill. Aubrey, Milly, and Jonah Story have never met their rich, reclusive grandmother because she disowned all four of her children before the cousins were born. Their parents claim not to know why, and when she writes to invite the cousins to work for her at her island resort for the summer, the parents let them know that they're taking the offer, no questions asked. When they arrive, the resort manager who hired them has vanished, their grandmother doesn't seem to have known they were coming, and they quickly find themselves caught in a web of murder and secrets that they may not survive.

This was a pretty good distraction read on the treadmill. There were twists and turns, mostly believable, but the four narrator structure sometimes distracted from the story more than it helped to tell it. Overall, though, this was entertaining.

11/52 - Emma Cline's Daddy: Stories - Based on the reviews, I'm one of the few who didn't like this short story collection. It wasn't bad, and sometimes had interesting characters, but a day after finishing it I can barely remember what any of the stories were about, with vague recollections of two and the other eight just being a blank. These were well written, but often felt incomplete.

So... onward to March, and more books!

New Year, New Books

We're five weeks into the new year, and I've read more than five books, so I guess I'm ahead. Some of this is because I've been trying to get back into a more regular treadmill schedule, and I read the Kindle on the treadmill to make me forget that I'm on the treadmill, but also I've read a few interesting books that I kind of flew through.

1) Void Star, by Zachary Mason - I must have read about this in an article, because it was sitting on my Amazon wish list when I logged in to spend my holiday gift cards, so I ordered it. It takes place in the near future, where sea levels are rising and vast AIs serve tech millionaires. Irina, who has a cybernetic memory implant, reads a secret in her employer's glasses and finds herself in danger while Kern, a thief and street fighter, is hired to steal a phone and finds himself pursued across the planet. Meanwhile, Thales tries to recover from injuries he received during an assassination attempt on his father, and all three of them end up on a collision course with each other in surprising ways. This was interesting, but also felt a little hollow. I liked it, but it felt like something undefined was missing.

2) The Meaning of Mariah Carey, by Mariah Carey - I'm just going to go ahead and say at the front end that I underestimated Mariah Carey. Even knowing that she writes her own songs and is not an unintelligent person, I was still expecting this to be a fluff book, and it was anything but. I was definitely not expecting a compelling discussion of racism and classism, not just in the entertainment industry but also just in every day life. There are a few parts where things are clearly glossed over, notably any part that would reflect poorly on Mariah, but most of this is honest, entertaining, and sometimes heartbreaking. If you like stories about other celebrities, there's enough of that to entertain, too. This was a really good book.

3) Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston - The son of the American president and the younger prince of the UK (not Harry, because this is fiction) have been tabloid rivals for years, and after a disastrous incident at the royal wedding of the crown prince, the two of them are thrown together in a goodwill tour. And then they're in a very hot and heavy secret affair. Will the Crown accept a gay prince? Will the scandal sink the President's reelection? And will the relationship survive when the whole thing blows wide open? This was a cute little fantasy, and a very entertaining read.

4) X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, by Stuart Moore - I knew, going in, that this was an adaptation. Movie and comic adaptations tend to take the main story, and embroider a little. There will be things that add some depth, give some background, or show you what characters were doing when they weren't featured. For example, the novelization of the final episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", "All Good Things", includes a scene with Dr. Pulaski that wasn't in the show. It fits in the book because thematically, it felt like it should be there. 

This is a long way of saying that good adaptations add to the story instead of subtracting from it, and that this book is not a good adaptation. Some of the changes are to update the story, as cell phones and the internet didn't exist when the original was written, but some of them make no sense whatsoever, and add nothing. Professor X is absent for most of the novel, the subplot with Dazzler is removed entirely, and a subplot of Jean and Emma Frost fighting over Scott is added in, decades before that happened in the comics. Overall, this book was kind of a mess and you should skip it.

5) Severance, by Ling Ma - Candace Chen works in the publishing industry in Manhattan, and keeps coming in to work as Shen Fever spreads throughout the city and the world. Moving into the office as the city empties and shuts down, she finds herself completely alone until she finally leaves New York and ends up with a group of survivors led by Bob from IT, who is leading them to a mysterious Facility in Chicago where they can survive. Bob isn't what he seems, and neither is the Facility, but by the time Candace realizes that, will it be too late? This was entertaining but a little bit sad, making it maybe not the best thing to read during a pandemic.

6) Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones - Sawyer and his friends wanted to play one last senior year prank on their friend, sneaking Manny the mannequin into the movie theatre where she works. It all seemed like fun and games until Manny got up and walked out with the rest of the crowd at the end of the movie, vanishing into the night, and then Sawyer's friends started to die. Is the supernatural at work, or is there a problem a little more grounded in reality? In the end, as the deaths circle closer and closer to Sawyer, will it even matter? This was a short, fast read made even faster by how quickly it ratchets the tension up, and I enjoyed it.

7) The Invention of Sound, by Chuck Palahniuk - Gates Foster has been searching for his missing daughter for 17 years. Obsessed with tracking pedophiles across the Dark Web, his life and sanity are on the verge of disaster. Mitzi Ives is one of the leading Foley sound engineers in Hollywood. If you want the sound of a man being eaten by rats or a woman screaming as she's stabbed to death, you call Mitzi, but where does she get her authentic sounds from? As the two of them head closer and closer to each other, will they bring each other down, or will they expose the terrible truth about Hollywood and the value of human suffering? This wasn't Palahniuk's best or his worst, but it did feel kind of skippable.

Having finished all of these, I'm reading a fictional book about a rich family with dark secrets on the treadmill, and a nonfiction book about a rich family with dark secrets off the treadmill. I guess maybe I have a theme for February?

 It's January first, which means it's time to tally up how many books I read this year. The answer, which I won't know until I reach the end of this entry and do some actual tallying, is probably going to be lower than most of my friends would assume. I may not even have made 52, which is my yearly goal. 

A lot of my friends assumed that I spent most of the pandemic reading on my couch like a "Twilight Zone" character who has time enough at last, but I spent most of the pandemic trying to distract myself. There was a lot of cooking, a daily regimen of Facebook posts, setting myself up to work from home, hanging pictures on my walls after living in my apartment for a year, a three week period when I contemplated making a plate wall out of vintage Pyrex tableware, deciding to go low carb in quarantine (I've lost a little over 30 pounds since March), and a weird stretch for a couple weeks when I didn't read anything. Every time I sat down to read, I just fell asleep, so I ended up playing video games while binging Netflix instead.

Last year I ended up with a tally of 40 books for the year. Not bad, but not my goal of 52 (one book a week). This year I swore I was going to do better and get back to my normal reading level, but like I explained above, 2020 didn't turn out quite like anyone planned. When I last updated on my reading in November I was up to 36 books. I've read at least four books since then, but did I read enough to get to 52?

Let's tally up the rest of my November and December reading and find out!

37) Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars. I've been getting back into Stephen King this year, after a stretch when I found his work kind of self-derivative and less entertaining than I had for the past couple of decades. The stories in this book, like the title suggests, tend to be a little on the darker side. They're definitely not happy endings, which may not be for everyone in the current circumstances, but I found them engaging and at least one of them is still sticking in my head this many weeks later.

38) Edgar Cantero's The Supernatural Enhancements. I remember this book getting a lot of fanfare when it came out, as groundbreaking and exciting. A man and his companion inherit an estate, which may be haunted, and may also be the meeting grounds of a secret society. The house is full of mysteries that they must unravel, which the author presents in the form of riddles, codes, and puzzles. I can see how people thought this was fun, but there has to be a clever story beneath the clever storytelling, and that didn't really happen here. When everything was said and done the actual plot was kind of dull, and I was reminded of that time someone told me that Special Topics in Calamity Physics was as good as The Secret History and it really, really wasn't.

39) Octavia Butler's Kindred. Before the pandemic I'd been at the used bookstore and realized that I hadn't read any of Butler's work since I was in college. I wanted to add more work by people of color to my reading, so I grabbed this and left it on my "unread books" shelves for a while. Oddly, the week after I decided to read it, Dolly Parton mentioned that it is one of her favorite books, so I guess Kindred was having a bit of a moment there. It's a really good book about a modern black woman who keeps being summoned through time to save her ancestor from death, with the complication being that she's being pulled to the antebellum South and the ancestor is white. He has enslaved her other ancestor, and she is forced to keep saving him so that he can father the child that she'll descend from. Butler doesn't shy away from the horror of the situation, and she gives it a realistic (within the circumstances) resolution when she could have given a more romanticized, expected one.

40) Tom Parker Bowles' The Year Of Eating Dangerously. I was halfway through this book before it occurred to me to read the author information on the jacket and realize the author was Camilla's son from her first marriage. I binged "The Crown" during the pandemic, so I was mildly surprised to realize I had a book vaguely connected to the royals here in my house this whole time. It's weird to read a book about travel during the pandemic, when we cannot (or at least should not) be out traveling. The author spends a year hopping around the globe eating food that is dangerous or taboo, or that is produced in dangerous settings. To his credit, he tries to temper the stunt eating with visits with locals and guides to also work in some of the culture and traditional cuisines of the places he visits, but most of this was just a long list of foods I won't ever eat.

41) Budd Schulberg's The Disenchanted. A fictionalization of F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood at the end of his life, this story had me wishing, as I so often do when I read books about Fitzgerald rather than by Fitzgerald, that he would hurry up and die already. I love my imaginary literary husband very much, but the sloppy drunken self destruction is eventually overwhelming, and I just want it to end. I imagine Zelda and I had this in common. 

42) S.K. Tremayne's The Ice Twins. At first it seems like we're only dealing with one mystery in this book. Reeling from the loss of their daughter, a married couple and the surviving twin move to a remote Scottish island that they just inherited, hoping to rebuild their lives. As soon as they get there, their daughter starts telling them that she's the other twin, and that they held a funeral for the wrong one. Did they make a horrible mistake? And why is the husband so angry, and what's he hiding in his locked chest of drawers? And why does the wife have gaps in her memory? And is the dead twin a ghost back for revenge? This was a nice, tense read on the treadmill all the way up to the end, when the story falls apart completely and you're denied witnessing the actual climax.

43) Anna Kendrick's Scrappy Little Nobody. This was funny, and kept me from realizing that I was working out on the treadmill. It was a fun read that would probably also be good for a trip, if we can ever get on an airplane again.

44) E. Lockhart's Genuine Fraud. The basic premise here is "What if The Talented Mr. Ripley was bout women instead", but it's well written. The story unfolds in reverse, which made it pretty interesting, because it starts out seeming like one kind of book, and slowly unfolds into being a completely different one.

45) Rebecca Fishbein's Good Things Happen to People You Hate. A collection of essays billed as "hilarious", I found this entertaining, but wouldn't go quite as far as hilarious. There are some funny parts, but it's not a funny book.

46) Mariko Koike's The Graveyard Apartment. Why not round out the year of not being able to leave your homes with the story of a Japanese family that wants to leave theirs and may not be able to. They thought the apartment in the brand new high rise was a great place to grow into their lives and move past their marriage's dark beginnings, and sure, it's next door to a graveyard, but worrying about that is just superstitious nonsense, right? Nope. Not at all, actually, and the worse things in the building get the more it looks like they may never leave.

So, to wrap up the year, I ended up six books ahead of last year, but six books behind my goal.

Maybe in 2021 we can do better.