While I've been looking at a lot of these yearly wrap up posts, one thing I was reminded of is how much I've really managed to make reading a happy habit. I've always read a lot, but since we all locked down in 2020 I've tried to be a lot more intentional about how I read and now I'm pretty happy with that. Keeping track outside of Good Reads has been really helpful for that, and it's nice to know more about what and how I read. I've also had fun putting together my monthly reading updates (and I've had fun making tools to put together my monthly reading updates).
I like year end updates and I thought it would be fun to wrap up my reading in 2024.
What I Read
I read 103 books this year. Good Reads says I read 104, but I can't figure out where I got my wires crossed. As I wrote about earlier, apparently half of those were mysteries and much of the rest were either fantasy or science fiction.
I split my reading about half and half between audiobooks and eBooks. My reading was also split about 50/50 between things I borrowed from the library through Overdrive / Libby and stuff I purchased or already owned. I mostly read newer books, with about half coming from the 2010s and 2020s.
I read 48 unique authors. Elly Griffiths wrote a third of the books I read — although she only wrote about a sixth of the actual pages. I also read a lot of Anna Lee Huber, Andrea Penrose, Victoria Goddard, Martha Wells and Carola Dunn.
My reading tailed off towards the end of the year, which involved me getting distracted watching Critical Role play D & D and then later the UK show Taskmaster. Still I read stuff that made me happy and I was happy reading.
Important Books
I think the books that are going to stick with me the most from 2024 are The Lays of the Hearth-Fire which are a really interesting story of growth and systems and and friendships and decolonialism and retirement. The writing is very good, although maybe a little loose. I keep wondering if the books have to be as long as they are, and, although some parts feel like Goddard is returning to the same ideas with more detail each time, there aren't any parts you could lose without mangling the texture of the story, if not the narrative.
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Weirdly — and it is weird — Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan is going to stick with me. I'm not sure I'll read it again — although the audiobook is half prose, half numbers station, so a text version might be worth it — but it affirmed my nerdy passion for keeping track of things and trying to build structures that help me experience the world. I received The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen for Christmas and I'm looking forward to it as well.
I don't know know that it's important, but The Legend of Galactic Heroes details the fall of democracy to authoritarian power, over ten light novels. If it has a theme it's that everyone's schemes fail, if no where else, then in death. Given the stubborn grimness with which it views life, and the chaos of 2025 so far, it stands out to me, even if I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for entertainment or thought. I mostly read it because the anime has a lot of nifty space ships.
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Authors I Liked
I honestly enjoyed every book I read this year. A few authors really struck me as interesting or particularly fun.
As I wrote about when I looked at the Mysteries I read this year, Carola Dunn writes books that I devoured. I can't totally define what it is but her Daisy Dalrymple books were so easy to read that I was finishing about one a day, until I intentionally slowed myself down. Some of what I liked was in the optimism and energy of the protagonist.
Martha Wells also writes books that really grab me. The Murderbot books are probably my favourite of her works, but the Raksura books also really good. It took me a little time to get into them — given how unexpected and complicated the world she built is — but once I was in, they were really fun books. I think both Murderbot and Witch King / The Rising World, grabbed me with imaginative worlds, but were easily understood and highly relatable.
Anna Lee Huber really stood out to me for the way her protagonists work. In both the The Lady Darby Mysteries and The Verity Kent Mysteries she creates a protagonist that's instantly interesting, with secrets and layers that support that initial impression as the series go on. They also have historical english female characters who, anachronistically or not, feel independent and active in a way that that fits in the historical frame of the story. They're also just really interesting books to read.
Hanna Hagen Bjørgaas's book on wildlife in the city, Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild was very interesting. It inspired me to think a lot about nature and how much space for nature there is — and can be in our urban environments. It also set the bar high for non-fiction.
Louise Penny was also interesting with the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache books. In particular they really remind me of how I understood Canada in the the late 1990s and early 2000s. A Canada that's transmitted through the CBC, by a guy who's probably wearing a cable knit sweater with cigarette burned holes in the sleeves, and which has differences, like anglo and french, but that is mostly pastoral with a little bit of grit underneath.
Trends And Stuff
My system — such as it is — for reading at the moment is largely to shift between different types of books. So if I'm reading a mystery as an eBook, then I'm more likely to read something Sci-Fi as an audio book. I also move between heavier and lighter books so while I was blasting through the Daisy Dalrymple books, I was also working on the Lords of Uncreation which was a less light read. (It was still pretty good and contained very few sentient spiders — which can be important notes for a Tchaikovsky book.)
My mix of mysteries, sci fi and fantasy stayed fairly consistent through the year and I swapped audio and eBook pretty consistently as well.
I read on average 97 ePages per day (ePages as defined by selecting the "kindle" edition of every book in Good Reads) and I finished a book every 3.5 days which was right on track for my goal of two books every week.
The shortest book I read was We Interrupt This Broadcast by Mary Robinette Kowal — available on her blog at 25 ePages. The longest book I read was At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard at 1330 ePages. The second longest book was The Hands of the Emperor also by Goddard and also in The Lays of the Hearth-Fire series. She likes long books, although the shorts she's surrounded the main series with are also very good. The median length of book I read this year was 335 ePages.
The majority of what I read was published since 2010, about 3/4s of all the books. The earliest published book was Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, published in 1923 and the most recently published book was Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs, published in June 2024, which was incidentally the last book I read in 2024. The only other 2024 published book I read was The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths. I don't know why by for the last two years, I've read the most books from the year before (so more 2023 books in 2024 and more 2022 books in 2023), and very few from the actual year.
Reading 2024
I like how generally unstructured my 2024 reading was. In some past years I've have a more focused project or an author or genre I've been looking for but for the most part I just let my self float through 2024. I always had an interesting book to read and I like most of what I read.
