Sam鈥檚 Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2024

8,362

pages read

books read

Sam

Shortest Book

272

pages

Longest Book

960

pages

Average book length in 2024

491

pages

Most Shelved

3,752,012

people also shelved

Least Shelved

249

people also shelved

Sam鈥檚 average rating for 2024

3.8

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.56 average

Sam鈥檚 first review of the year

it was amazing

This is a novel every person needs to read at least once in their lifetime. Chronicling the ordinary lives of 5 university friends based in New York City with minute focus on one of them, A Little Life captures the essence of what it truly means to live. Jude, Willem, JB, Malcolm, and Richard each come from different upbringings, backgrounds, economic contexts, etc. yet they find a friendship with each other that spans a little over 3 decades. Ye ...more

厂础惭鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

it was amazing

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

The Grandmother Plot by Caroline B. Cooney

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

it was amazing

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas

Sam鈥檚 last review of the year

really liked it

The Cloisters is a great read on how academia can suddenly turn dark. Following a single summer of Ann Stilwell, the reader is taken through the glorious archives of the Met Museum of New York, specifically the Cloisters. Stilwell, our very drab and boring narrator, is determined to leave Walla Walla, Washington, as soon as she graduates. Specialising in Renaissance art, a very rare study that she was the only student of her professor, she finall The Cloisters is a great read on how academia can suddenly turn dark. Following a single summer of Ann Stilwell, the reader is taken through the glorious archives of the Met Museum of New York, specifically the Cloisters. Stilwell, our very drab and boring narrator, is determined to leave Walla Walla, Washington, as soon as she graduates. Specialising in Renaissance art, a very rare study that she was the only student of her professor, she finally gets a summer internship at the Met. Upon arriving at the Met, she is told her supervisor/mentor was called away on urgent business and, therefore, was not needed at all. As fate would have it, Patrick Roland requires assistance in the Cloisters with him and another grad-student Rachel. They are researching tarot card reading/ divination during the Renaissance era. Ann, who is escaping the lingering memory of her father and does not believe in fate, decides to hide her own beliefs to take the job offer that could possibly catapult her current lowly status in academia. Unfortunately, she's not the only one with secrets, and soon Ann is embroiled (almost seduced) into investigating the reality or surreality of the past and present.

Ann is not a bad narrator. She is just very impressionable. I get why someone from a small town would be enticed by the highly influential people of a big city such as New York. I don't blame her for wanting to be liked, almost loved, by Rachel, whose old money status has gotten her to become widely known in the academic world at such a young age, by Patrick, whose mentorship reminds her so much of the father she lost too soon, or even by Leo, the cool gardener of medieval medicinal herbs whose subtle criminal activity gives her a thrill, especially when he starts showing romantic interest in her. But Ann is as self-aggrandizing as the academics around her. She knows that there's something off about the people she works with, but her fear of having to go back home and the desire to attain the same status as Rachel leads to her making the worst choices. Nevertheless, Katy Hays shows us that perhaps this is the result of what happens when you don't have a leg-up in the world, such as nepotism or special recommendations, you end up choosing what is best for yourself, and only yourself only. That is, until tragedy strikes. ...more

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