Midnight Musings – A journal by Jade Walker

My top 10 favs of 2024: A year spent reading, watching and listening to stories

December 4, 2024 / No Comments

Ok, my friends. It’s time to share my annual list of pop culture wonders. Over the past year, I consumed 80+ books, 60+ TV shows, 40+ movies and many podcasts. These were my favorites.

(Note: Not all were released during the past 365 days.)

MY FAVORITE BOOKS – FICTION

1. “Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop” by Hwang Bo-Reum

2. “Worst Case Scenario” by T.J. Newman

3. “Herding Cats” by Sarah Andersen

4. “You Like It Darker” by Stephen King

5. “Book of Doors” by Gareth Brown

6. “Target Zero” by Jack Mars

7. “Assassins Anonymous” by Rob Hart

8. “Lock In” by John Scalzi

9. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt

10. “Out of Body” by Jeffrey Ford

(Honorable mentions: “The Tainted Cup” by Robert Jackson Bennett, “Leave No Trace” by A.J. Landau, “Split Second” by David Baldacci, “Stroke the Flame” by Elizabeth Briggs and “The City of Brass” by S.A. Chakraborty)

MY FAVORITE BOOKS – NONFICTION

1. “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore” by Evan Friss

2. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” by Salman Rushdie

3. “Notes From the Porch: Tiny True Stories to Make You Feel Better About the World” by Thomas Christopher Greene

4. “The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels” by Pamela Prickett

5. “Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime” by Val McDermid

6. “Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases” by Paul Holes

7. “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World” by Christian Cooper

8. “I Will Find You: Solving Killer Cases from My Life Fighting Crime (Homicide Hunter)” by Joe Kenda

9. “All the Living and the Dead” by Hayley Campbell

10. “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife” by Sebastian Junger

(Honorable mentions: “Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice” by David S. Tatel, “What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds” by Jennifer Ackerman, “The Salt Path” by Raynor Winn, “Other-Wordly: Words Both Strange and Lovely From Around the World” by Yee-Lum Mak and Kelsey Garrity-Riley and “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” by Dwight Garner)

Overall reading ratio: I read 26,238 pages. Books were split 58% fiction to 42% nonfiction and 36% female authors to 64% male authors.

MY FAVORITE TV SHOWS1. The Great British Baking Show

2. Fall of the House of Usher

3. The Diplomat

4. Man on the Inside

5. Escape to the Country

6. The Repair Shop

7. Reluctant Traveler

8. Homicide Hunter: Joe Kenda

9. Cold Case Files

10. See No Evil

(Honorable mentions: Last Week With John Oliver, Reacher, Evil, Unforgotten, The Daily Show, Bodies, Ghosts, Elsbeth, Julia, Love Your Garden, Gardener’s World, Grand Designs, The Great British Baking Show: Holiday Edition, Manhunt, Grace, Agatha All Along, Shrinking, True Detective and Late Night Seth Meyers.)

MY FAVORITE MOVIES

1. The Lost King

2. Navalny

3. Rustin

4. Shirley

5. The Lost Letter

6. Oppenheimer

7. Steve!

8. Freud’s Last Session

9. Hitman

10. The Great Escape

(Honorable mentions: The Burial, The Midnight Sky, Idea of You, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The Marvels, His Three Daughters, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Deadpool & Wolverine, Civil War and Leave the World Behind)

MY FAVORITE PODCASTS

1. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe

2. Small Town Dicks

3. Break in the Case

4. Law & Order: Criminal Justice System

5. Detective

6. Cold Case Files

7. Criminal

8. Casefile

9. American Homicide

10. Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus

(Honorable mentions: Naked Lunch, BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, Fail Better With David Duchovny, Sue Perkins: An Hour or So With…, Choice Words with Samantha Bee, Christmas Past and Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda)
5 weird facts about my cats

November 24, 2024 / 1 Comment

I once saw Pepper eat a small spider in a single gulp. She then walked around the house with the spider’s web entangled in her whiskers as though she was wearing an Olympic gold medal.

Like a velociraptor from “Jurassic Park,” Treacle can open doors. This is a very dangerous skill because Treacle also likes to eat cords — which we keep hidden behind closed doors.

Pepper, Treacle, Chai, Trifle and Choux

Several times of the day, Chai will walk into a room, demand that I pat her booty and then flip over onto the carpet so I can do the job properly.

Trifle came to us when she was a wee kitten and has been raised with all three of her sisters. Yet she’s the only one who continues to suck a blanket and knead like she’s nursing her ghost mom.

Choux snores like a buzzsaw. It’s fantastic.
Quote of the day

October 26, 2024 / No Comments

“Writers, remember: Never underestimate the power of just showing up every single day. I’ve been showing up at the N.Y. office of Penguin Random House every single day for the past three years demanding they give me a book deal. Has it worked? No. Do they have multiple restraining orders against me? Yes. Do I have to wear increasingly elaborate disguises to get into the building? Also yes. But will I give up? Never.” —Carlos Greaves
A wonderful fall day

October 12, 2024 / 5 Comments

Today was pretty much perfect.

I started with a cup of hot tea and a good book. Chatted with M and snuggled with the cats. Then, I made dinner and watched a couple of episodes of the fantastic Britbox TV show “Unforgotten.” Have you seen it? Phenomenal.

Spent the afternoon cleaning up the garden for winter and listening to Stuart McLean stories from “The Vinyl Cafe.”

The oven just dinged, telling me it’s properly pre-heated. So, I’m going to head into the kitchen to put together a pumpkin pie, and then return to my office to do some writing about positive news, death and reading while it bakes.

Once M returns home from his kayaking trip, the darkness falls and the temperatures drop, we’ll turn on the fire and watch a horror movie in honor of Halloween.

In a year of struggles, this was a wonderful fall day.
15 years ago

October 4, 2024 / 2 Comments

In 2009, Marcus and I donned our Renaissance finery and gathered with friends in an old Vermont cemetery to exchange vows. A ghost was my maid of honor. Colored leaves fell softly from the surrounding trees, decorating the gray tombstones like confetti. And a full moon rose into the sky, just as we had planned.

Fifteen years later, we’re still saying “I do, for as long as we both shall live.” No matter how mad the world gets, we have each other.