2024, The Year in Review

2024 is almost over, and in truth, it was a pretty bad year for this website. Google changed the way it searches, and I’ve seen another big drop in traffic here. I’ve also mostly abandoned social media. I know I should be staying up to date with that kind of stuff, but I’m too busy. I’ve been taking courses for my job and my family life is hectic at the moment. I’m still getting through a book a week, but I’ve only been able to do so by listening to audiobooks at double speed while I am doing the dishes at night.

When I started this blog, I was in my twenties, and I was working at a radio station for 3-4 hours a day. I was able to spend hours studying arcane lore in the library on my days off. Now, I am an adult with a real job and a driver’s license. My life is good, and I have no regrets, but at this point I’m lucky if I can sneak in a chapter from my devil books when my kids are in swimming lessons.

I’ve always done a mix of fiction and non-fiction on this blog, but there were a couple of years (2020-2021) when I focused mostly on horror novels. I tried to rectify that last year aiming for a 50-50 split, and this year I actually did more posts on non-fiction. Many of these were on conspiracy theories.

I got really into conspiracy stuff at the beginning of the year. I had steered away from that field for a few years, but the time was right to return. I think James Shelby Downard’s book probably pushed me over the edge. I only realised while writing this post that I planned a post about his essays too. I did the reading, but apparently never got around to writing about it. Maybe I’ll return to that soon. It’s truly mad stuff. Obviously, I did some books about aliens too. Most of these have a conspiracy edge to them too:

Last year, I started reading true crime, and I read a few more books from that genre (mostly on the Zodiac Killer).

I don’t to buy many old paperback horror novels anymore, but I read a fair few of them this year. I still have quite a few on the shelf left to read, thank goodness. I think The Rats may have been my favourite.

Also, I am a powerful magician, so I read a few grimoires. (I didn’t include the one on using black magic to get a rim job below because the cover would make this post look like garbage.)

There were a few books that don’t really fit in the above categories else. Some of these were great. I absolutely loved reading Robert Westall’s stories and everything by David Case.

The end of February will mark a decade of this blog. I made my 500th post a few weeks ago, and I’ve covered more books than I care to count at this point. I’m not sure how much longer it will last to be honest. One of the reasons I haven’t allowed the decline in traffic to end this site is the fact that aside from reading creepy books I genuinely don’t know what else to do with my free time. Any recommendations, please send them my way! Anyways, if you want to take a scroll through memory lane, I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Happy New Year!