Six months into the year, and I’ve made it through 24 books. Averaging exactly 3.0 stars, which sounds unspectacular until you think about what that number actually represents — a real mix of genuine surprises, comfortable old favorites, and a handful of books I probably should have DNF’d but stubbornly finished anyway. At this rate, I’m on pace for somewhere around 48 to 50 books by December, which means my goal of hitting 50 this year is looking very achievable. If anything, I might blow past it.
I wanted to sit down and actually think through what this first half of the year has looked like, not just log the star ratings and move on. There’s a real story in the data if you look closely, and some patterns I hadn’t quite noticed until I laid everything out side by side.
The Standouts
Four books earned the full five stars from me this year, and together they tell an interesting story. Judge Stone by Viola Davis genuinely had me hooked from start to finish — the kind of book where you look up and realize you’ve read for two hours without noticing. Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo was similarly excellent: well-paced, satisfying ending, exactly the kind of book that makes you feel good about the time you spent with it. Revenge Prey, the 36th entry in John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport series, was a return to form — no gimmicks, no over-the-top set pieces, just a solid, well-executed crime novel. And The Fourth Option by Jack Carr was an absolute page-turner from the opening chapters, the kind of thriller that makes you cancel plans.
Here’s what jumps out at me: three of those four favorites — Davis, Rindo, and arguably Carr — are authors I picked up this year after doing some actual research into reviews rather than just grabbing whatever was on the bestseller table. That’s not a coincidence. It’s paid off. When I put in the effort to actually vet a book before buying it, I’ve been rewarded. That’s a habit worth keeping for the back half of the year.
The Disappointments
Not every experiment worked out, and five books this year got the dreaded one-star rating. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker didn’t land for me at all — I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone spend time on it. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a reread, and I’d hoped maybe I’d missed something the first time around, but no — still poorly written regardless of how famous Fitzgerald was. Slaughterhouse-Five just wasn’t for me. Neither was The Little Prince, which I found to be an odd little fantasy story that never grabbed me. And then there’s In Too Deep, the 29th Jack Reacher novel, which I think marks the point where I’m officially done with that series — Reacher has just run its course for me.
What’s notable here is the pattern: three of my five worst reads this year were classic, “important” literary titles rather than genre fiction. Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Saint-Exupéry — books that show up on every “must-read” list you’ll ever see — just didn’t do it for me. I think this confirms something I’ve suspected for a while: I’m a commercial thriller and mystery reader at heart, and I probably shouldn’t keep forcing myself through literary classics out of some sense of obligation. Life’s too short, and there are too many good thrillers waiting.
The Comfortable Middle
The bulk of my reading this year has lived in that solid 3-to-4-star range, and it’s mostly been series fiction — the stuff I come back to year after year. Joe Pickett, two Longmire books, Colter Shaw, another Lucas Davenport entry, J.P. Beaumont. I also branched out into some standalones like The Women, Mad Mabel, and Naked in Death, all of which were perfectly decent reads without quite reaching the top tier.
But going back through my own reviews, I noticed I kept using the same complaint over and over: “predictable,” “far-fetched,” “formula.” Books in the Longmire series, The Brothers McKay specifically, and that last Reacher book all got hit with some version of this critique. There’s a real pattern of long-running series leaning too hard on outlandish, life-or-death survival situations to manufacture tension, when honestly the characters and the humor are strong enough to carry a quieter story. It’s starting to feel like these authors don’t trust their own foundations anymore.
Looking Ahead
So where does that leave me for the second half of the year? I think the lesson is clear: keep researching new authors before buying, since that’s where the real discoveries have been. Ease off the classic literary fiction I’m reading out of obligation rather than actual interest. And maybe give some of these long-running series a breather, or at least go in with tempered expectations about where the plot is headed.
Here’s to the next 25-plus books and hitting that 50-book goal by year’s end.
Books read so far for 2026