Do you ever think you know what your reading year will look like, only to find it turns out to be completely different?

I honestly thought this year would be jam-packed with action/adventure thriller-type novels. I discovered and fell in love with Matthew Reilly’s books last year – completely OTT action scenes and I was HERE for it! His book Temple was my surprise book of the year last year. And then there was Decipher by Stel Pavlou which was another action/adventure thriller with bonus added sci-fi – it was utterly batshit and I fell in love with it.

So yeah, I thought this year would be very much in that vibe. I started reading the Scarecrow series by Matthew Reilly…

But then I fell into memoirs. Out of the 50 books I’ve read so far this year, 14 have been memoirs (that’s 28%) and 4 have been biographies.

There have been food-related ones (Grace Dent, Jay Rayner, Ed Gamble)
There have been mental health, health and neurodivergence-related ones.
There’s been the latest Jeremy Clarkson/Diddly Squat one.
There’s been best-selling celebrity memoirs (Jennette McCurdy, Britney Spears)

And over a third of them have been fostering memoirs by Cathy Glass!
How? Why?
I haven’t a fucking clue but I am completely obsessed and just devouring them. I cannot get enough and have a whole bunch of them on my Borrowbox list

In the second half of the year though I want/need to pay more attention to the prompts in reading challenges. I’ll be interested to see if the memoir pattern continues, if another one emerges or if, by focusing on more specific books there’ll be no pattern at all.