David鈥檚 Year in Books

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2024

4,575

pages read

books read

David Antrobus

Shortest Book

pages

Longest Book

512

pages

Average book length in 2024

351

pages

Most Shelved

450,545

people also shelved

Least Shelved

2,048

people also shelved

David鈥檚 average rating for 2024

3.9

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.48 average

David鈥檚 first review of the year

it was amazing

This novel will sit with me for a long time. Somehow I already know this. Perhaps then I can do it justice with a more complete review.

But first, if you think a slow-burn crime story can't be every bit as compelling as a fast-paced mystery, this will disavow you of that notion. And similarly, for those who assert that women can't write male characters (and vice versa), along comes Tana French to completely obliterate that notion: Cal Hooper is fu This novel will sit with me for a long time. Somehow I already know this. Perhaps then I can do it justice with a more complete review.

But first, if you think a slow-burn crime story can't be every bit as compelling as a fast-paced mystery, this will disavow you of that notion. And similarly, for those who assert that women can't write male characters (and vice versa), along comes Tana French to completely obliterate that notion: Cal Hooper is fully realized and believably complex.

Also, it can't just be me, or even that title evoking John Ford's classic film, but this feels so much like a western that it's almost disconcerting. Somehow I can't square the west of Ireland's rolling, rain-curtained hills and sodden, peaty fields with the remote majesty of Monument Valley in Arizona or the bleak, alien Badlands of South Dakota, and yet the feel is the same.

Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles.

And:

He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn鈥檛 meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn鈥檛 made from and hasn鈥檛 sown or harvested, and they鈥檝e soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle.

And finally for now, French has pulled some kind of genre bait-and-switch. I mean, yes, it's something of a crime story, as we expect from her, and there are those classic western undertones of the lone outsider (former lawman) in a small town (the fictional Ardnakelty in County Sligo, in this case), but in the end, this is a literary novel about belonging and loss and morality and community in both its dark and light forms and all forty unnerving shades of green in between. ...more

顿础痴滨顿鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

it was amazing

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

really liked it

David鈥檚 last review of the year

really liked it

I have a sense that horror authors are increasingly realizing that horror fiction only truly works when the audience is invested in the characters. In this novella, Nathan Ballingrud goes one step further: he makes us care about very flawed characters. Which for me only adds to the authenticity. Characters too likeable are in danger of becoming two-dimensionally bland, whereas the handful of people populating this small, incestuous world of a non ...more

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