January Reads 2024
January Reads 2024: 8 Books I Read this Month
By: Brittany Shields
I’m still playing catch up from last year, but I did manage to read a couple books for my 2024 reading challenge!
Here is the link to Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge which is a list of 45 fun prompts that I came up with, albeit strategically because I need to do some damage on my to-read list. It functions similarly to the PopSugar Reading Challenge if you’re familiar with that. There are printables and links to ways of tracking so check it out!
January was a fun month of reading because I got to read so many different genres— thriller, mystery, rom-com, sci-fi, psychology, nonfiction, and classic!
1. Simply Lies (Mickey Gibson #1) by David Baldacci
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
[Fulfilled ‘Book by an author who has published over 20 books’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
“Life was a shell game. The winners could just hide the truth better than everybody else.”
This was a bit of a slow start for me. Probably because I started the book at the tail end of holiday activities so I was only able to read a little bit here and there. But once I got into it, it was more engaging.
Simply Lies is the story of an ex-cop, cyber-sleuth, single-mom (Mick) being roped into a ‘treasure hunt’ by an unidentified caller (aka Arlene) who wants her to find the pile of money that was stolen from the mob years ago and whose owner has just been found murdered in one of his homes.
Mick has to maneuver the cryptic and manipulative Arlene, the cagey, hard-to-figure-out cop on the case, and the other mob-related players that want back what was taken. But which players are really out to harm her and which ones can she trust? Not everyone is who they say they are.
Read my full review to see what other reviewers have said, some things that bothered me, and the content advisory for swearing.
2. The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins
Genre: Mystery
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
“‘For Camden. Time Brings All Things To Pass.’ And as I drive away from the new life that I’d built for myself, heading back towards my past, I wonder if those words were supposed to be an encouragement or a warning. Or a threat.”
The heiress is Ruby McTavish Kellmore with the nickname Ruby Kill-more due to the deaths of her four husbands. She’s been dead for ten years now but is still pulling the strings with her money.
Camden is the son she adopted later in her life and the subsequent heir and current holder of the family fortune. He tried to escape that life and family but has been called back home to North Carolina to deal with his cousins who want their share.
Hawkins’s writing has the twisty dysfunctional families vibe and the characters aren’t really that likeable.
Read my full review for notes on the formatting, see what disappointed me the most, and get a better book recommendation with a similar premise.
3. Woke Up Like This by Amy Lea
Genre: Rom-Com/YA
[Fulfilled ‘A book by an author from a different country than you’ (Canada) prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
Woke Up Like This is everything you would want in a rom-com!
It is 13 Going on 30 meets To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. If you don’t like either of those, you probably wouldn’t like this, but I thought it was cute, light-hearted, and humorous.
This book has a unique twist and one that made this a bit different than ‘every other love story’ because it has time travel!
Char and J.T. (enemies) are decorating for senior prom when Char falls off a ladder onto J.T. and they BOTH wake up in a house together in their 30-year-old bodies, presumably engaged to be married in a few days.
Enemies to spouses?!
While they are trying to figure out how to get back they make discoveries about their relationships and each other that changes their perspective on things.
Read my full review to see if this should have been marketed as a YA novel.
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Genre: Classic/Fiction
[Fulfilled ‘A Classic’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Somehow I never read this one in high school.
It’s a hard book to read because there is torture and brainwashing and it’s just overall a depressing and hopeless book.
There are lots of places to find a literary review of this book, my review is not one of them.
You don’t really read 1984 for the ‘story’ or plot or characters. You read it because you want to see the observations Orwell makes about a controlling government and what it will do to maintain that control for no other reason than just the power.
What interested me most in the book were the correlations between this book and what we see in America today.
Read my full review to see my comparisons and observations!
5. The Lies We Believe: Renew Your Mind and Transform Your Life by Dr. Chris Thurman
Genre: Non-fiction/Psychology/Christian Living
“Truth matters. It matters not just in our relationships, in what we say to others, but inside each of us.”
Combining psychology and biblical truths, there are a lot of good insights in this book to help us recognize that the way we think about God, ourselves, life, and others is important and it’s often distorted in ways we never realized.
Thurman has written this book to help expose some of those lies and to tell us the truths we SHOULD believe that will transform our lives.
After explaining the ways that our minds are under attack and some methods of overthrowing mental strongholds, he goes through the lies that we believe about ourselves, others, life, and God, followed by chapters specifically about lies women believe and men believe.
Read my full review to see some of the lies Thurman addresses and see what my favorite chapter was.
6. The Couple in the Photo by Helen Cooper
Genre: Mystery
“She feels like something dangerous. What she knows about me, about us. What she could destroy. I’ve been careless, taken my eye off what’s important, and things have gone too far.”
This is not a high-octane thriller, but more of a suspicion-driven domestic thriller.
Adam & Lucy and Scott & Cora are two couples who are best friends. Adam, Scott, and Cora went to Leeds University together and have a history. That history comes to haunt them when Lucy sees a coworker’s photo of Adam with another woman.
Then the woman turns up dead in the Maldives- murdered. And Scott was supposedly just with her.
And then the coworker who showed her the photo finds herself in the hospital.
Lucy’s world comes crashing down when more and more secrets are revealed as she searches for the truth.
Read my full review to see what I liked, get a warning, and check out my learning corner!
7. Deep Freeze (Revival #1) by Michael C. Grumley
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
“If there was one thing Williams had learned over his seventy-plus years on Earth, it was that everyone always had their own agenda.”
Deep Freeze hooks you from the start with a mysterious prelude where a man stops an armed robbery at a convenience store then boards a bus that gets in an accident and falls from the bridge into a freezing river where he is able to save everyone on the bus except himself.
We are not told what happens to the man until we are introduced to our other characters who are all in a lab working on a cryonics project where their goal is to resuscitate a human from their frozen state.
Yep, it’s the guy who froze in the river.
But who is actually running the project, what is the end-goal, and what makes this man so special?
This is shaping up to be a pretty good series, reminiscent of an A.G. Riddle’s sci-fi, med-tech type of thriller.
Read my full review for a cast of characters, some more plot details, and some of my comments both good and bad about the book!
8. Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal by Matthew T. Martens
Genre: Nonfiction/Cultural
“How would we design the justice system if we did not know our lot in life and thus did not know whether we were more likely to be a crime victim or a criminal defendant?”
This is a must-read book.
‘The American justice system is corrupt’ is a politically charged and unhelpful statement. But I’ve heard it like a broken record lately.
This book has done what nothing else has been able to do thus far: tell me specific ways the justice system is unfair, biased, or unjust.
Martens has both decades of law experience— as a federal prosecutor AND a criminal defense attorney— and a seminary degree. This puts him in a unique and extremely helpful position to help Christians (or non-believers for that matter) see the ways the justice system has failed (from firsthand experience in a courtroom) and help us think critically about how our criminal justice system functions in light of biblical justice.
Martens’s main thesis is that a justice system should be aligned with biblical justice in that it functions to love ALL neighbors— both the victims and the accused.
Read my full review to see what the five pillars of biblical justice are, the problems Martens reveals about the court system, and the four things we can do after reading this book.
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