Initially, I’d planned to review the books I read this year individually. Then, I thought I’d do a write a summary of the first five. Then ten. I’m up to twelve books at the moment, so I thought I’d better dive in.

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie – This is the first Miss Marple mystery. Over the course of Christie’s books, the local authorities eventually learn to respect Miss Marple’s insights, but since I’ve been reading them out of order, I wanted to curse them out for being so blockheaded and disregarding older women. (Or maybe that’s just a reaction to the fact that things haven’t changed all that much?) In any case, the solution to the mystery was both a surprise and satisfying. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for meddling old women!

Making It So by Patrick Stewart – I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Stewart. For the first half of the book or so, I declared that he could read the phone book, and I would be happy to listen. I really enjoyed hearing about what it was like for him to grow up in a small town in England after WWII, as well as the hard work–and lucky breaks–it took for him to become the world-famous actor he is today. Once he had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and was well on his way, I had to return the CDs to the library. (Yes, I still have a CD player in my car. Lucky me!) By then, I’d lost interest in the recitation of works and theaters and celebrities he’d met. Not that he is anything but humble and gracious as he talks about his accomplishments, but as with fiction, the struggles in his life were much more compelling than the successes. I’d finished over half of the book by that point, so I rounded up and marked it as complete.

Here by Richard McGuire – This book was well-regarded enough to have been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, but I had to read it quickly as it was one of many library holds that arrived at the same time. As a result, I had a difficult time trying to disentangle and follow the storylines playing out at different times in the house/location’s history. In the end, I gave up on the story and appreciated the art. For me, North Woods by Daniel Mason did a better job telling different stories set in the same location.

Seven Brief Lessons in Physics by Carlo Rovelli – I bought Rovelli’s book The Order of Time after listening to it because I wanted to better understand some of his arguments about what time is. So I’d had high hopes for this book presenting an interesting perspective on the basics of physics, though it turned out to mostly be an overview–with a bit more about the physicists themselves, which I appreciated. I like to know more about the human faces behind the discoveries. He also included an overview of his own ideas about quantum gravity, which were new to me. But overall, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown – Eddy Hood, host of The Read Well Podcast and YouTube channel, went on and on about this book, so I bought a copy. I sat down with this book and tried applying the podcast’s mantra: “Read slowly. Take notes. Apply the ideas.” I did the first two. But by the time I reached the end, I still hadn’t gotten a lot out of it and couldn’t find much to apply in my life.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman – I listened to the audiobook in 2024 and bought a copy in hopes of rereading it and taking the ideas in it to heart. (It’s difficult to take notes when you’re driving.) Unlike with Essentialism, I didn’t take notes while reading, just marked passages I thought were particularly insightful. Mistake! Now I’m going back only as I make time (i.e., very rarely) and attempting to suss out what key idea I had previously identified. I’m currently still on Chapter 2 of my re-re-read, but that’s not to say the book isn’t worth reading. I very much appreciated the central idea that we’ll never get everything done that we want to do, so we need to be deliberate in our choices of how to spend our time by identifying what’s most important to us and how we can best focus our efforts to support those areas of our work and/or life.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – By the end of this book–which was much longer than I remembered it being–I wanted to punch Tom Sawyer. He is a terror. Huck Finn isn’t a saint by comparison, but at least he tries to be a decent person, though his definition thereof is a commentary on the times. I didn’t really enjoy this book (I wished they’d drowned the king and the duke), but I finished it as background for reading James.

James by Percival Everett – I really wanted to like this book. The beginning set it up to be both witty and heartbreaking . . . but after it abandoned the source text, it didn’t work as a story on its own. If I hadn’t just read Huck Finn’s story, I would have been confused by some of the characters and set pieces (the stranded steamboat, the king and the duke, the feuding families). And while we’re told that James really wants to get home and free his wife and daughter, he seems to content to hang around with Huck on his adventure until he decides to drop his grand revelation. This is James’s story, but I didn’t feel like the book provided a strong sense of who he was and what motivated him. I understand that he didn’t have a lot of agency, but he mostly just reacted to what happened to him, which contrasted with his strong internal life (which I would have loved to see more of). People who are much more discerning readers than I am have celebrated this book, but I couldn’t find what they found in it.

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott – As a lover of science (and narrative structure), I always want to know why something is happening. But slipstream? (the New Weird? magical realism? I wasn’t sure what to call this collection) laughs at such requests. The idea is that things may be unexplained/unexplainable, but the story still provides a satisfying conclusion or emotional resolution. Were they all successful in this? Not for me. Still, there were a few stories that stuck with me: “Sundown at the Eternal Staircase” (with a list of things you should and shouldn’t do on the staircase that reminded me of the first episode of Welcome to Night Vale), “A Diviner’s Abecedarian,” “Drowning Lessons,” and “A Lily Is a Lily.”

In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration by Shane O’Mara – I somehow missed the subtitle when I bought this book at Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio (owned by the lovely Jenny Lawson), but if I was looking for a prod to get outside and walk more, this is definitely the book to read. This is very not much Thoreau’s Walking. Instead, it is a scientific exploration of the neurological, physical, psychological, social, and creative processes of walking. I enjoyed it much more than I expected to, and I learned a lot about how the brain and walking are interconnected. Random fun fact from the book: the larval sea squirt has a rudimentary brain, eye, and spinal cord until it goes from a mobile creature to a stationary one, fixed to a rock. Once it stops moving, it absorbs? consumes? these organs, becoming “a stomach with some reproductive organs attached” (p. 30). Having a brain, it seems, goes hand-in-hand with movement. Note to self: Move more!

Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science–and the World by Rachel Swaby – While I love hearing the stories of women who succeeded in STEM-related fields, their stories always make me feel like I should have pursued a career in math and/or science, BUT also remind me that I never had the drive to explore. I had a telescope and a microscope and rarely used either. I was the type of student who was most happy in subjects where the correct answer could be found by following a simple process. Breaking out of that is difficult. In any case, these women’s stories were inspiring. Even those I thought I knew–Heddy Lamar and Florence Nightingale, for example–had aspects of their stories I’d never learned about. Perhaps if I’d had these women as role models when I was younger, I might have stayed on the science path.

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris – I bought this book when I was on Alfred Wainwright’s coast-to-coast walk across England in 2019, inspired by reading Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways. There’s video somewhere of me reading the poem “Conkers” from this book on one of the last days of the trip. While I initially bought it for the words–and the reminder, which Macfarlane echoes in his book Landmarks, that words describing the natural world are disappearing from our dictionaries and our discourse–I love it for the drawings. I aspire to write like Robert Macfarlane in his other books (Underland was amazing), but I don’t think I’m his intended audience for these poems. On the other hand, I also aspire to create art like what Jackie Morris produced for this book. I’m tempted to read The Lost Spells (another collaboration between the two) to see more of her art.

Have you read any of these books? If so, do you have a different take? If so, I’d be curious to hear what you thought of them.

Reading: Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
Drinking: Genmaicha (toasted rice green tea) from TeaSource