Alex鈥檚 Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2024

8,243

pages read

books read

Alex

The Bad Guys in Let the Games Begin! by Aaron Blabey

Shortest Book

192

pages

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Longest Book

874

pages

Average book length in 2024

329

pages

Most Shelved

2,391,265

people also shelved

Least Shelved

361

people also shelved

Alex鈥檚 average rating for 2024

3.6

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.49 average

Alex鈥檚 first review of the year

it was amazing

Every so often, I decide to reread a book that I devoured and cherished during my youth. More often than not, this exercise ends in disappointment. Either I find the book is too long and tedious, or the violence is gratuitous, or the humor comes across as juvenile, or the characters aren鈥檛 as fleshed out as I remember them. With this trepidation in mind, I set out to reread Glen Cook鈥檚 The Black Company, and I鈥檓 pleased to report the book hits ju Every so often, I decide to reread a book that I devoured and cherished during my youth. More often than not, this exercise ends in disappointment. Either I find the book is too long and tedious, or the violence is gratuitous, or the humor comes across as juvenile, or the characters aren鈥檛 as fleshed out as I remember them. With this trepidation in mind, I set out to reread Glen Cook鈥檚 The Black Company, and I鈥檓 pleased to report the book hits just as hard now as it did in my teens.

The novel follows a mercenary company through the eyes of their physician and analyst, Croaker, and while the story is epic in scope, it鈥檚 decidedly NOT epic fantasy. The Company is constantly engaged in battles, but Cook skips over the vast majority of them, focusing on the time spent in between. It鈥檚 a novel about soldiers, not a novel about war, and Cook uses the element of fantasy to emphasize the mortality and frailty of the guys in the trenches. (Powerful sorcerers exist who can move heaven and earth, but they鈥檒l fall to a blade between the shoulders, same as anyone else.) It鈥檚 not a story about good versus evil, but it is a novel about morality, while simultaneously being a story about survival and putting one foot in front of the next.

The themes aren鈥檛 the only thing I love about this story, though, as the way Cook tells it is so unique. Epic fantasy tends to be obnoxiously verbose, with authors sometimes spending two pages describing a character鈥檚 appearance, but Cook gives you a word or two, if you鈥檙e lucky. You build a sense of the characters through their actions and dialogue, and that鈥檚 enough. Cook鈥檚 prose is concise but evocative, with more two word sentences than I can remember. This book is only about 80-90,000 words, yet it packs as much story as many three times its length, but it鈥檚 not just that Cook is frugal with his prose鈥攈e leaves a lot unsaid and trusts the reader to fill in the rest, which I wish more writers were confident enough to do. Now that I鈥檓 more well-read than I was in my teens, I can see the influence in Cook鈥檚 writing of classic mystery writers like Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout, not only in the element of mystery he infuses into the story but also in the paucity and efficiency of the writing.

To be clear, this style isn鈥檛 for everyone, as evidenced by some of the 欧宝娱乐 reviewers who seem to hate it, but for me, The Black Company is a breath of fresh air: dark, gritty, and grimy, yet nuanced, cerebral, and emotional. It remains one of my favorite books of all time, and I look forward to diving back into the rest of the series. ...more

础尝贰齿鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

really liked it

The Bad Guys in the Others?! by Aaron Blabey

From Badger to Worse by John Patrick Green

Cat on the Run in Cat of Death! by Aaron Blabey

it was amazing

it was amazing

No One Leaves the Castle by Christopher Healy

What did you read this year?