My daughters and I started tracking what we read each year in Notes on our phones.

At the end of the year 2022, we made a Christmas ornament that held tiny copies of the book covers. We had to make these representations small enough to fit through the top of a clear, plastic ornament.

Numbers of books read, I always finish last. I’m not a fast reader, but I am a careful reader. (Unless counting Audible books. Listening to a book does not aid retention.) Nine times out of ten, I end up buying a hardcopy of a book I liked on Audible.

I write in my books. I revisit my favorites. I’m trying to date when I start and finish reading.

Read and/or listen. The limits on what I can learn expand through reading.

I read 34 books in 2024, up from 23 in 2023. I don’t set a goal, nor do I keep a checklist.

Books come to me. Is it like the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear?” Well, for me, books do that.

And a book is only as good as it is timely.

My Top Ten of 2024

Passage from Rules of Civility, Chapter Twenty: “Hell Hath No Fury.”

“I read a lot of Agatha Christie that fall of 1938––maybe all of them . . . her books are tremendously satisfying. Yes, they are formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying . . . Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care. But I think there is another reason that is at least as important, if not more so––and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve. . . men and women . . . are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them [in] and intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary Mover at the dawn of time. For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal judgment exist . . . But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives . . . [people] who are not exactly what they seem–– and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just desserts.

But when we do so, we rarely remember to count ourselves among their company.”

Amazing how writers embed biblical principles in their stories.

An oblique reference to Matthew 7:1–2? “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” OUCH!

“If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow and broad or narrow and deep.” C.S. Lewis, from Letters to Arthur Greaves

My reading in 2024 took me through historical fiction, fantasy, travels to Vietnam and India, Appalachia, Kentucky, and introduced me to real people as well as characters who become real on pages in books.

Don’t leave home without a book. Books can take you anywhere.