We have finally come to the last month of 2024, and oh no! You noticed that you have only a couple of days to reach your 2024 Reading Challenge Goal and are way behind in the books you need to read! Whether you are using Goodreads Reading Challenge, my challenge on the StoryGraph website, or a challenge you set for yourself, don’t worry, fellow bookworms! With a couple of days left in the year, it is still possible to achieve your mission. How, you ask? With short reads of course!
Check out these 15 books, books that came out this year, that will help win your reading challenge before the clock strikes 12 on December 31. Are you up for the challenge?
She’s Always Hungry: Stories by Eliza Clark
240 pages
A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.
A teenager longs for perfect skin.
A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.
A young man takes the night into his own hands.
Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger. (Credit: Harper Perennial)
Greta by Manon Steffan Ros
224 pages
Greta Pugh is dead.
The small village of Bethesda, Wales, is no stranger to tragedy. Once a thriving, prosperous community, the town has been marred by an ever-deepening class divide. But now, with rich and popular Greta Pugh found murdered in the local quarry, everyone in Bethesda is rattled, and all their secrets are at risk.
No one is more aware of this than Greta’s friends, especially Shane, a classmate and the son of the Pughs’ cleaner. Everyone knows more than they’re letting on, but when the police and the media descend with all their probing questions, there’s soon nowhere left to hide the answers.
As Shane watches the investigation unfold, he grapples with everything he knows about the Pugh family and all he’s learning about the people around them. Each revelation brings the town a step closer to the truth of who killed Greta…but only one person may truly know why. (Credit: Amazon Crossing)
Brielle and Bear: Once Upon A Time by Salomey Doku
304 pages
A wonderfully romantic love story perfect for teen readers – the first in a full-colour graphic novel series
First-year student Brielle, a daydreamy book lover, knows everything there is to know about fairytales. Returning to the city of Rosebridge four years after moving away, she attends Once Upon a Time University, with the intention of living her fairytale dream. And when she meets Bear, shy vice-captain of the Princes rugby team, at the bookshop where she works, Brielle’s dream is off to a good start.
Determined to forget the past, and with an unexpected new relationship blossoming, Brielle feels she’s finally living the dream. That is, until she discovers that she’s not the only one hiding something . . .(Credit: Harper Fire)
The Big Ask by Simon James Green
128 Pages
Harvey is popular, cool, plays football and has been in a relationship with his girlfriend Summer for as long as anyone can remember. Alfie is not popular, not cool, has a sick note so he doesn’t have to play any sport, and has been in a relationship with his Xbox since forever. So when Summer dramatically dumps Harvey just a few days before the school prom, no one is expecting Alfie to ask Harvey to be his date. Least of all Alfie. But sometimes amazing things can happen when you take a chance …(Credit: Barrington Stoke)
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
294 pages
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.
But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale.
Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles.
Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future – before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good. (Credit: Tor Nightfire)
Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop edited by Otto Penzler
288 pages
The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store and never published elsewhere, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
The prompt for the story requires three elements: that it be set at Christmastime, that it involve a crime of some kind, or the suspicion of one, and that it be set at least partially in the bookstore. And from these loose structural guidelines, diverse tales took flight. The dozen tales included in this volume are among the finest to be produced in this annual tradition, sure to charm any reader looking for a holiday-themed escape.
Included herein are the ingenious “Snowflake Time” by Laura Lippman; Lyndsay Faye’s tale of vengeance “A Midnight Clear”; the challenging brainteaser, “A Christmas Puzzle,” by Ragnar Jónasson; “Hester’s Gift,” an impossible crime story by Tom Mead; the suspenseful “The Christmas Party” by Jeffery Deaver; Thomas Perry’s hilarious comedy of errors, “Here We Come A-Wassailing;” and other tales appropriate for the season, collected and introduced by Otto Penzler. The result is, objectively speaking, the finest “stocking stuffer” that a mystery fan could hope to find. (Credit: Mysterious Press)
This Land Is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story by Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo
208 pages
Jaime Reyes is an ordinary high school student in El Paso, Texas, with a deep love for his family, culture, and home. Whether it’s working with his dad at the auto shop or a multi-generational barbecue filled with music and dance, Jaime loves nothing more than his neighborhood’s spontaneous gatherings that go late into the night. But lately he’s begun to realize that he and his border community are being used as pawns in an increasingly toxic immigration debate.
The last few months have seen armed troops deployed along the U.S. and Mexico border, manufactured crackdowns at official border crossings, and now at the community level, a mounting resentment amongst a group of disaffected and reactionary youth who believe they’re being “replaced” by El Paso’s growing immigrant population. And to make matters worse, one of Jaime’s oldest friends, Riley, has bought into the propaganda. What started off as innocent web searches has now led Riley down a path to joining an unabashed hate group with a chapter in El Paso looking to cause some real-world violence.
But Jaime’s problems get even more complicated when he finds an odd bug-like artifact while stargazing. He starts feeling a little different–like there’s another voice in his head pushing him towards his most base instincts. And to make matters worse, he’s been having surreal dreams that show him that the true threat El Paso faces isn’t “illegal aliens,” but actual aliens known as the Reach. In fact, according to his dreams, Jaime is meant to pave the way for the Reach’s impending invasion! (Credit: DC Comics)
Last One To Die by Cynthia Murphy
288 pages
16-year-old, Irish-born Niamh has just arrived in London for the summer, and quickly discovers that girls who look frighteningly like her are being attacked.
Determined to make it through her Drama Course, Niamh is placed at the Victorian Museum to put her drama skills to the test, and there she meets Tommy: he’s kind, fun, attentive, and really hot! Nonetheless, there’s something eerie about the museum…As present-day serial attacker and sinister Victorian history start to collide, Niamh realizes that things are not as they seem. Will she be next? (Credit: Delacorte Press)
I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This: 18 Assurances on Grief by Clare Mackintosh
224 pages
“Grief has run through my life like thread through fabric; at times gossamer-thin and barely there, other times weaving thick, clumsy darns across the rips. In my grief I am a mother, a child, a sister, a wife, a woman, a friend. I am also a writer.”
When Clare Mackintosh lost her five-week-old son, she soon discovered there are no neat, labeled stages of grief like so many books insist. The shape of each loss is different; when a parent, relative, or friend passes, we grieve the person in all their beauty, their humanity, their imperfections. For Clare, there was no preparing for the anger and excruciating ache of knowing her child’s life would remain unlived. This is the book she needed then.
Inspired by a viral Twitter thread Clare wrote on the anniversary of her son’s death, this deeply honest, compassionate memoir will bring solace and encouragement to anyone who finds themselves walking with grief, whether for a season or for several years. It is for those who need a little voice saying: I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This, for the people who love them, and those who understand that great loss can be a window through which we see how powerful, and unending, love can be. (Credit: Sourcebooks)
Graveyard Shift by M. L. Rio
144 pages
Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.
One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks–and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought. (Credit: Flatiron Books)
Queen B by Juno Dawson
240 pages
It’s 1536 and the Queen has been beheaded.
Lady Grace Fairfax, witch, knows that something foul is at play–that someone had betrayed Anne Boleyn and her coven. Wild with the loss of their leader–and her lover, a secret that if spilled could spell Grace’s own end– she will do anything in her power to track down the traitor. But there’s more at stake than revenge: it was one of their own, a witch, that betrayed them, and Grace isn’t the only one looking for her. King Henry VIII has sent witchfinders after them, and they’re organized like they’ve never been before under his new advisor, the impassioned Sir Ambrose Fulke, a cold man blinded by his faith. His cruel reign could mean the end of witchkind itself. If Grace wants to find her revenge and live, she will have to do more than disappear.
She will have to be reborn.
In this gripping, propulsive, sultry short novel, Juno Dawson takes us back to the bloody beginnings of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven to show us the strength, steel and sacrifice it takes to make a sisterhood. (Credit: Penguin Books)
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell by Nicholas Meyer
288 pages
June, 1916. With a world war raging on the continent, exhausted John H. Watson, M.D. is operating on the wounded full-time when his labors are interrupted by a knock on his door, revealing Sherlock Holmes, with a black eye, a missing tooth and a cracked rib. The story he has to tell will set in motion a series of world-changing events in the most consequential case of the detective’s career.
Amid rebellion in Ireland and revolution in Russia, Germany has a secret plan to win the war and Sir William Melville of the British Secret Service dispatches the two aging friends to learn what the scheme is before it can be put into effect. In pursuit of a mysterious coded telegram sent from Berlin to an unknown recipient in Mexico, Holmes and Watson must cross the Atlantic, dodge German U-boats and assassination attempts, and evade the intrigues of young J. Edgar Hoover, while enlisting the help of a beautiful, eccentric Washington socialite as they seek to foil the schemes of Holmes’s nemesis, the escaped German spymaster Von Bork.
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell plunges Holmes into a world that eerily resembles our own, where entangling alliances, treaties, and human frailty threaten to create another cataclysm. (Credit: Mysterious Press)
Yours from the Tower by Sally Nicholls
256 pages
Tirzah, Sophia, and Polly are best friends who’ve left boarding school and gone back to very different lives. The year is 1896, and Polly is teaching in an orphanage, Sophia is scouting for a rich husband at the London Season, and Tirzah is stuck acting as an unpaid companion to her grandmother. In a series of letters buzzing with atmosphere and drama, the friends air their dreams, hopes, frustrations, and romances. Can this trio of very different young women–one industrious, one artful, and one in exile–find happiness and love near the dawn of the Edwardian era? From the award-winning author of the Carnegie Medal-nominated historical romance The Silent Stars Go By comes a playful, feel-good story of friendship and aspiration pitched just right for fans of Jane Austen and her contemporary disciples. (Credit: Walker Books)
Clear by Carys Davies
208 pages
John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland–Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds. “Clear chronicles the surprising bond that develops between these two men…pack[ing] a great deal of power into a compact tale” (The Wall Street Journal) about connection, home, and hope–in which John begins to learn Ivar’s language, and Ivar sees himself reflected through the eyes of another person for the first time in decades. (Credit: Scribner Book Company)
Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood
4 Hours and 24 Minutes
An enemies-to-lovers spicy romance set in the world of video gaming from the bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis—available only in audio!
Viola Bowen has the chance of a lifetime: to design a video game based on her all-time favorite book series. The only problem? Her co-lead is Jesse F-ing Andrews, a.k.a. her arch-nemesis. Jesse has made it abundantly clear over the years that he wants nothing to do with her–and Viola has no idea why.
When their bosses insist a wintery retreat is the perfect team-building exercise, Viola can’t think of anything worse. Being freezing cold in a remote mountain lodge knowing Jesse is right next door? No, thank you.
But as the snow piles on, Viola discovers there’s more to Jesse than she knew, and heat builds in more ways than one. (Credit: Spotify Audiobooks)
Leave a Reply