Mid-Year Reading Update: Favorites (So Far) + Finishing My 2024 Reading Challenge

The last 3 months was an excruciating blur for me and I am left utterly burned out. But the good news is that here we are, we survived – suddenly, it’s July and we are somehow in the second half of this year. I am still processing, to be honest. But I figured I could do a good old mid-year reading update just to keep track:

My April to June

Burning both ends of the candle with work left me with little time to do anything else – which led me here: I only finished 2 books in the last 3 months. 😅 I basically only started / continued intentionally setting aside time to read in the last week of June but still so happy that I finished something – I started these ones back in April 😂:

• Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki – 4/5☕[short review]
• And Then There Were Crumbs (A Cookie House Mystery, #1) by Eve Calder – 5/5☕

Reading Butter when there are a lot going on in my life was an uphill battle, to be honest, given how slow of a book it is. But it was so worth it because it is one of the best books I’ve read recently (see below). What initially piqued my interest was how other reviewers found it difficult to pin down this book’s genre – which I wholeheartedly agree now that I finished it. It is more of a psychological book, than a crime/mystery book. And can we talk about the food writing? I’m pretty sure I gained a couple of pounds since I started reading this. Read it and you’ll know. 😉 And Then There Were Crumbs (sorry, I can’t help to use it like this, it’s such a good title!). This is something random that I came across on Audible as the series is free if you have Audible Plus. I thought this would be another run-of-the-mill cozy mystery that I can use as background during my walks but this book was seriously so good! It took a while for me to finish it because life just got a bit too busy but I didn’t have any problem picking it up again after a while despite this being a whodunnit with many details to remember. It was so nice to have something cozy but absolutely brilliant. It reinvented popular tropes and twisted and connected them in unexpected ways. I love it so much! ✨

Finishing my 2024 Reading Challenge

Finishing those last books above meant that I finally finished my 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge:

I may have cheated a bit by including short novellas in a series in the count but this is how I roll 😅. It is honestly a bit fast (considering how slow of a reader I am) but I love that it’s already finished in the first half of the year. That means that I won’t really be too conscious about targets in the next remaining months. As with the last few years, I only put a 24-book cap in my challenges so as not to pressure me too much. I love the effect it has. Gamifying my reading (via challenges) helped a lot in maintaining a consistent reading routine, which is what I wanted in the first place. But I noticed that aiming for the numbers, which goes on and on once I read more, kind of robbed me of the joy and comfort of it. So this low-stakes goal is a healthy balance for me, and I am happy with it. This is my 13th year (!!!) of monitoring this and I don’t think I would stop anytime soon.

Mid-Year Favorites

Out of the 24 books I’ve read so far, these 6 books emerged as my favorites:

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’ Donoghue – 4.5/5☕ Coming of age in 90’s Ireland, an extremely layered story that presents a protagonist that is both messy and relatable. It’s a story of a young woman confronted by hard choices to keep on living – a story of friendship, and, sometimes, of love. Irish lit fic forever! 🍀
• Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone by Amy Key –  5/5☕ It’s about loving and living and contentment and yearning and everything in between. A life lived in anticipation of romantic love but finding yourself partnerless and never truly grasping it at the stage in your life that you initially thought you’d have it. I hold this book so close to my heart. 💙
• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett –  4.5/5☕ Cozy fantasy with a bit of high-stakes plot (would that qualify as cozy still?) – but it was also comforting without being too deep. It was one of the best portrayals of faeries I’ve read lately, reminiscent of ones from old stories and folk tales. 🧚
• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto – 5/5☕ Unexpectedly so good – a witty, laugh-out-loud book that tugs the heartstrings in all the right places. Eunice Wong’s narration also added a lot to the experience so if ever you wanted to try this book out, make sure to also try the audiobook version. 🔍
• Butter by Asako Yuzuki – 4/5☕ Unapologetic exploration of the lens that Japanese society put in womanhood, appearance, and being a woman in a working place. Engrossing, despite being a slow-paced mainly psychological book. The food writing in this is a thing of wonder. They’re right: this book was hard to place and hard to describe. 🧈
• And Then There Were Crumbs by Eve Calder – 5/5☕ A brilliant cozy mystery. It reinvented popular tropes and twisted and connected them in unexpected ways. I love it so much! 🍪

(Read other Months in Books entries: January 2024; February and March 2024)

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What I’m currently reading

I am just getting my groove back and is suffering again from the all-too-common inability to focus on one thing 😅, but these are the books that I am actively reading at the moment:

• Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3) by Abby Jimenez – I’ve read every single Abby Jimenez book and I’ve loved each one. At this point, she’s an auto-buy and one of my comfort authors to read. I was snorting/laughing reading this but also nervous for what’s to come. Knowing her, there’ll be something heavy here.
• Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell, John J. Ratey – Started reading this for personal research in light of a suspected diagnosis.
• Openings by Lucy Caldwell – Lucy Caldwell is one of the first authors I discovered when I moved to Belfast. I fell in love with her short story collection Intimacies. I wasn’t initially planning to buy this one when I went to the bookstore but after reading Anton Chekov quote as epigraph (“You must either know why you live, or else… nothing matters… everything’s just wild gras…“) in this collection, I was intrigued. I am already in story #6 and I’ve been loving it so far. The first story, “If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now” has me in a chokehold.
• A Tale of Two Cookies (A Cookie House Mystery, #3) by Eve Calder – As of writing, I already finished Book 2, Sugar and Vice (4/5☕ btw) and just started the last book (so far) in the series. Really loving this series and I hope Eve Calder writes some more. I wonder if she can also share the cookie recipes I’ve been drooling over since Book 1 (ala Coffeehouse Mystery). 🤤

What I’m looking forward to

I have a lot of books I am juggling at the moment but these are the following books that I really, really, really wanted to get through at some point in the following months:

• Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn – Started this but took a break. I wanted to read this as this is one of the favorite books of a reviewer I follow and trust and I think that counts for something.
• Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors – The idea of this book feels like a dream. Plus the gorgeous cover. I want this in my feed.
• Happy Place by Emily Henry – Started this during my Morocco trip but wasn’t feeling the vibe. Emily Henry has been really giving so far with all the books I’ve read from her so I really am looking forward to push through this because I feel like there is something in there.
• The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami – That cover screams my name. Look at those gorgeous English and Japanese covers.
• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May – I want to change my relationship with rest and this book sounds like a good place to start.

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That’s it for my mid-year reading update! I have a lot of other things I want to share as well, especially travel-wise, so I hope I can set aside some time to draft a personal post for once. I’ve also been juggling a couple of projects in my head at the moment but let’s see where we can go and land. In any case, if you get to this point, I just want to say ✨thank you✨ for reading this mind dump. I don’t have a lot of real-life bookish friends so this is my way of verbalizing and talking about the things I love, even if I’m not sure if any one is even reading – it feels like exhaling. I love this space with all my heart. 💖 See you still the next update! 👋✨

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HOW ABOUT YOU? HOW WAS YOUR first half of the year? DID YOU HAVE ANY NOTABLE FAVE? 

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