Reading With Tyler

I experimented with Short Stories in December, and so it looks like I read more than November. Ultimately, I don’t think short stories are for me because even though they’re quite quick reads they almost always feel too rushed to feel like a good or great story…

I also had a guest stay with us for a week which meant that I didn’t have as much time to read as I had hoped during my time off in December. That being said, I read some brilliant books in December!

In December, I read 16 books which is a mindboggling number! However, when you consider 8 of the 16 were short stories (with the shortest of them being 55 pages long and the longest being 207 pages), it’s easy to see how the number got so much bigger than the previous months!

Reading Stats

Lowest Rating: 3 Stars (Overall rating of The Under the Mistletoe Collection – however individually these books got a DNF as well as 2 stars)
Highest Rating: 5 Stars were awarded to many of the books read, however three were considered ‘6 star reads’ (Two Twisted Crowns, The Crimson Moth and Fate & Furies)

Biggest Surprise

Unfortunately the biggest surprise goes to Ashen Son, which is the first of Carissa Broadbent’s books that got less than 4.5 Stars for its rating. It turns out this is part one in the story Carissa was going to tell but according to her discord she doesn’t intend to finish it, at the moment at least. I wish I had known that before reading Ashen Son as I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Favourite Read

Rachel Gillig is back in the favourite read of the month, because it goes to Two Twisted Crowns!

Format Stats

Audiobook: 0	Kindle: 14
Paperback: 2	Hardback: 2

2024 truly was the year of the kindle. Even when I had a physical copy of the book I still prioritised reading the kindle format. Honestly, a lot of the books I read this year I could say this about… had the physical, read on kindle anyway. I think Kindle Unlimited will do a lot for me in 2025… though I will still likely purchase trophy books (as we all know, buying books is a different hobby to reading them!).

I thought the below were also interesting format stats:
Review Books: 1 (The Christmas Jigsaw Murders)
Short Stories: 8

Total Pages Read of Completed Books

Total: 4,495 Pages

I believe this shows that despite the fact that I read 5 books more than last month, I read less pages! Again because 8 books were short stories (or novella’s) rather than full length novels. I’m not upset about this, just because I read a lot of pages doesn’t mean the books were all amazing or worth the time! The size of the book doesn’t matter. I’m just thrilled that I’m reading!

New Genres? (Formally Genre Breakdown)

Alright, let’s be honest, after 6 months of these wrap ups we know I favour the fantasy romance genre, and flip flop between YA, NA and Adult with no preference… So did I explore any new genres?

I actually did! This month had my first book that was classed as Science Fiction – The Family Experiment. I rather enjoyed it! And I think I might prioritise getting to Dark Matter by Blake Crouch in the coming months because I think I’d like to dive into a more Science-y Sci-Fi!

I might remove this stat in 2025 as, as I already mentioned, I know what I like and read what I like and rarely move away from that… I might see if there is another fun stat that can take its place!

New Authors

Wow, most of the authors I read this month were new to me!! A handful of them, I will be looking into their available works / following the series that I started of theirs!

How was the month?

December was not as filled with reading as I had hoped, between having a guest stay with us for a week and multiple Christmas parties with my work and my partners work. This was why I read so many short stories! But a lot of those short stories were supposed to be Christmassy reads, and honestly, even though they were advertised as such, none of them were really great Christmas reads. This exception to this was Spectacular which I really did in enjoy… So, I didn’t exactly get the spirit of Christmas out of my reads. It’s okay then.

But when we consider the non short stories, I had a great reading month! I discovered some amazing new authors (Kristen Ciccarelli, Abigail Owen and Keri Lake immediately come to mind) and found some of my top books of 2024 from this months reads so no complaining there!

Review Dates

All of the books read in December have already had their reviews published! This is obviously not my usual style, but I did want all of the books read in 2024 published in 2024!

In 2025 I’ll be continuing with the 2 – 3 posts schedule! But I won’t be putting the pressure on in order to keep that up – but there will be at least one book review a week (unless I hit a massive reading slump!) and at least 1 blog post a month!