Goodbye 2024

Goodness, where did the year go? I'm sure I will forever associate 2024 with the elections - nothing much happened to us personally that was all that memorable. (No hurricanes, etc!)  So good riddance, 2024, even though I have no reason to think 2025 will particularly be an improvement!

We do have plans to go out to eat tonight with my sister, her husband, her best friend and her husband (who I'm sure I've met years ago, since he's from our hometown and I know his older brother, etc., but I don't actually remember him) - but it'll be good, my sister is a talker and so is Kathy so if the conversation flags otherwise I'm sure they'll pick up the slack. And we're going to a really good Mexican restaurant so I'm anticipating fajitas. Then we'll probably go home and watch some NYE broadcast, that's what we usually do. Big excitement, right?

My new year's resolution, so far as I have one, is to be more organized. I forget things. I need to move some money around and I need to figure out Medicare (oh god, I'm old) and well, fun stuff like that. (Rob went over the weekend and bought me new tires, which is also something I'd been procrastinating about. Yay for husbands.)

Books of 2024

I did movies I've seen, so now it's time for books. I'm not going to put the whole list here, but it says I read 41 books that were new to me, plus some novellas - 50 new-to-me things in all. Here's some of what I thought were highlights.

• The first things I read in January were Luanne Rice's Last Night and Last Day, very good thrillers. (The 2nd isn't a direct sequel to the first, but they're connected, as I recall.)
• The last new thing I read was Jenny Colgan's Cafe By the Sea, which I read in one day because I completely couldn't put it down. That woman's books seem to have that effect on me.
• The very last book I finished in 2024 (it's currently 10pm on New Year's Eve, as I'm writing this, so I don't think I'm finishing any more) was not new to me - it was an Expanse book, Babylon's Ashes. That's the sixth book of nine in the series. I hadn't re-read them in three years, apparently, but I don't think I'm going to read the last three right now because I don't like them as much!
• In all I have a list of 70-some re-reads for 2024 - I always re-read a lot. (I really don't obsess at all about the numbers because I read so much no matter what, but I do - obviously - keep lists.)
• Possibly my new favorites from this year are the (indirect) sequels to The Goblin Emperor featuring the character Thara Celehar, Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones. I believe there's supposed to be one more of those coming out next year.

I also read several more books in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, and those are always very good. There are quite a few of those still left for me, I haven't read nearly all of them. I also read another book about a Sherlock-Holmes-type character by the author of the books in the preceding paragraph (the Goblin Emperor universe, I like to call it) , Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette, in which the Sherlock character is an angel, of all things - but not at all a typical angel. I really liked that book a lot too, but trying to describe it is very weird. In fact when I tried to describe it to somebody they said "so it's fanfiction?" and apparently it did start as fanfiction but now it's an actual published book! (I assume that's possible because Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright!)

Happy 2025, everybody!