We have arrived at the final monthly reading record of 2024. I posted these updates for the final third of the year (see them all here). I found it a useful prompt to pay more attention to which books I read cover to cover and which I don't. I hope you found some value in it too, either as a way of finding new titles to try or as a means of comparing your opinions with mine. I plan to keep doing this through 2025, so all being well in twelve months we'll have an entire year to review together.
Sitting down to put this post together, I felt sure I had barely read anything this month. For the first half of the month I was very focused on getting enough podcasts recorded ahead that I could take the Christmas period off, and then once I started my break I have mostly been knitting, cooking and eating rather than reading. My records (aka my Storygraph profile) proved me wrong, though.
The books listed below are ones that I read in their entirety, either for pleasure, for a book club, or as part of a longer-term project. I skim a lot of others or read portions of them as I'm working on articles and podcast scripts, but I'm not counting those as fully "read". I'm presenting them in the order I read them throughout the month. If you'd like to see previous posts in this series, they're available here.
The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett
I said in my November reading update that I had read too many Janice Hallett books in quick succession and had thus killed my enthusiasm for her "documents in the case" style. I did not heed my own advice and lay off her for a while; I in fact read another one, this time the festive-themed novella she published in 2023. Unfortunately I did not find any of the qualities here that made her 2021 debut one of my most absorbing reading experiences this year.
This is billed as a "sequel" to that book, picking up again with some of the same characters and the same amateur dramatics group. In atmosphere and plot, though, the two books are not at all alike. There was little tension here as an obvious mystery with low emotional stakes unfolded. The adept plotting that I perceived in that first title was nowhere to be seen. This felt to me like a book that was turned around quickly to hit the Christmas book-buying market or perhaps to fulfil a contract, rather than something the author passionately wanted to write for its own sake. I must not read another Janice Hallett book for at least a year! Absence might make my heart grow fonder.
The Paddington Mystery by John Rhode
This is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen read for January, selected because it was published a hundred years ago, in 1925. This slender mystery is set in two London neighbourhoods that were rather down-at-heel in the aftermath of WWI — Paddington in the west and Clerkenwell in the east. A young man returns home after a frustrating night out and discovers a dead body on his bed. This person seems to have swum across the nearby canal, climbed in through the upper-storey window and then expired. Already shunned by his friends and family for his disreputable lifestyle, the young man is quickly condemned by all as a murderer. Only a peculiar professor, Dr Priestley, believes in his innocence.
John Rhode (real name Cecil Street) was a ridiculously prolific author in the first half of the twentieth century. The Paddington Mystery was the first of over 70 books he wrote featuring Priestley, and he had two other pseudonyms/detectives as well. If we imagine a progression from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot, then R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke and Rhode's Dr Priestley are the two most important stepping stones in between. I'm not sure I have the stomach to read dozens, but I certainly found this one a light and pleasant read.
Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater
For reasons that I hope will become clear in 2025, I am looking at a lot of historical fantasy at the moment. This is the opening title in a "Regency Faerie" trilogy and centres on a young woman who has part of her soul removed by an evil fae lord when she is a child. Years later she goes to London with her cousin for the season and various adventures ensue. Scissors, as you may be able to tell from the cover, are very important to the plot.
I was disappointed in this book. I generally have a pretty high tolerance for Regency anything, but the thin characterisation and poor development of magical lore frustrated me. "Faerie stuff" is a huge segment of fiction publishing at the moment, although I have yet to see the appeal myself. I tried reading the first A Court of Thorns and Roses book a while ago and was simply baffled by the supposed appeal of a misty, poorly described realm where everything and nothing happens over many hundreds of pages. Maybe I just haven't found the right faerie book yet...
The Holy Thief by Ellis Peters
The first Cadfael book, A Morbid Taste for Bones, is still by far my favourite one in the series. Partly this is because I first read it while staying at Winifred's Well, a beautiful cottage in a location significant to the story, and partly because I like a historical novel to feature some religiously motivated hijinks. I found this new-to-me nineteenth instalment in the series at a secondhand book sale and enjoyed it very much because it acts as a sequel to the events of that first book. The remains of Saint Winifred were brought from Wales to Shrewsbury Abbey at the start of the series, and in this one, her reliquary goes on a madcap cross-country journey involving theft, highwaymen, and pot-stirring nobility. Great fun.
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
I picked up this book in a library sale because I love another of Rowell's early 2010s novels: Attachments, about the workers at a local paper in Nebraska at the end of 1999. Emails play a central role in that plot, so I was intrigued to try another Rowell book that put a piece of ye olde tech — this time, landline phones — at the heart of a story.
This one didn't wow me in the same way as Attachments, which I have re-read multiple times and regularly recommend to journalist friends who feel nostalgic for the pre-internet newsroom. Landline is about an overwhelmed TV writer, Georgie, and her husband Neal, a stay-at-home dad, and their marital difficulties. Georgie needs to stay in LA to work over Christmas on a career-making pitch, messing up their festive plans. Neal takes their kids to visit his mother across the country anyway and seems to be ignoring all of Georgie's calls. Except she can call a version of him from the past via the landline in her old bedroom at her mother's house, where she lived when they were first dating long distance. Without wishing to spoil the ending for anyone who might read this, I'll just say that I felt that the promise of this intriguing premise was not fulfilled.
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch
Continuing with my audiobook project that I'm mentally nicknaming "Background Ben (Aaronovitch)". I found new things in this repeat encounter with the second title in the Rivers of London series, which was a nice surprise. I had completely forgotten about the moral qualms protagonist Peter Grant expresses about the way the Met in this slightly mystical version of the world polices non-human magical creatures. The philosophical debate about it at the end of the book is interesting and the ending is moving.
A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith
This was a Christmas present from my husband. It's always such a treat to receive a nicely-produced hardback edition of a new novel under the tree. I had no prior knowledge of this author or book, but judging by the fact that I had finished it by 26th December, I think we can say that it made a favourable impression.
This is a mystery set in 1901 in the Inner Temple, the ancient and peculiar community of lawyers in the City of London. I used to work in an office just outside the Temple's gates, ate my lunch in their gardens all the time and regularly sang in the church there, so I found the familiar milieu delightful.
The reluctant detective is one of the Inner Temple's resident barristers, who has a pathological love of routine. When he stumbles across the murdered body of the Lord Chief Justice on his office steps early one morning, his cosy Edwardian lawyerly life is utterly disrupted. The "mouse" of the title, by the way, refers to one of his ongoing cases, in which he is defending the publisher of a children's book about such a creature.
One of the blurbs on this book referred to it as "Shardlake meets Rumpole", and I will second this as an accurate description. Sally Smith is herself a KC at the Inner Temple, which I think helps with the vivid rendering of the setting and its atmosphere. I note that there is already a sequel slated for July 2025, so I will watch what she does with interest. (Although given my intention to lay off buying new books next year as far as possible — more on this in a "reading plans for 2025" post soon — I might have to hope that I get a similar gift under the tree next Christmas!)
Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts
Freeman Wills Crofts is a bit hard done by as a writer of interwar detective fiction, I think. The later critic Julian Symons lumped him into a subgenre he called "the Humdrums" and Crofts' literary reputation has never really recovered from this insinuation that his work is profoundly boring. He does indeed place a lot of emphasis on train timetables and exact journey times as a way of ruling suspects in or out of a case, but his novels are not dull.
It wasn't until I got stuck into this 1931 story about a double murder discovered aboard an otherwise unmanned boat in the channel that I finally realised why I find Crofts a restful writer to read. It's because his books showcase competence above all else: his detective, Inspector French, is quietly excellent at his job and goes about it in a very persistent manner. It's just nice sometimes to read a well-written linear narrative about someone capably sorting out a mess.
That was my reading for December: eight books, bringing me to a final total of 111 for the year. I easily passed my goal of reading 104 books in 2024 (or two a week). I'll be writing a look back at the whole year soon, with a few recommendations of the best things I read as well as some thoughts about how I'm going to read in 2025.
If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.
