Well, friends and enemies, I have finished all the books I can hope to finish before we ring in the new year so it must be time for one of my favorite traditions: the annual year in books post. It felt like I spent a lot of time reading this year, but I guess it was just an average amount of time because I ended up reading around what I normally read: I finished 69 books and about 25,000 pages. I do wish that the publishing industry would take a year off and give me some time to catch up and that I could take a year off work and all life responsibilities to read every day and knock out my to-read pile. Alas, life marches on and I can’t spend all my time reading. I say this, but it’s clear I wouldn’t spent all my time reading anyway. I am split between a number of hobbies, which is great, but it means reading is just one of many and I can only do so much!
This year I made it a goal to read a little bit every single day, and I did! I’m currently on a 381-day streak, which I plan to continue in 2025. I also abandoned the goal of reading a certain number of books and decided to set a page number goal and try to focus on some longer books. And I did read some long ones this year!
I post about my reading because I like talking about what I read and I am proud of myself for engaging in art and for learning more about the world. I would like to think that I might inspire other people to read too! Even though I am deeply invested in my own metrics, I think reading any amount at all is a good thing. If you read one book a month, you are doing more than most!
Before I get to my stats and the full list, I have two things to promote. First: your local library! The best way to keep the library funded and relevant is by using it. I love checking out ebooks from the library but they have music, movies, video games, and even musical instruments and seeds. Second: Story Graph! I’ve been using it the last few years and really like it. It’s a very nice way to track your reading. It’s run by one woman who loves to read and I think that’s great. If you join Story Graph, you can follow me @linzomatic.
Reading Stats
- Pages read: According to what I logged on Story Graph, I read 25,095 pages. This number includes books I haven’t finished yet. If I only count pages from books I finished, it’s 24,705 pages.
- Longest book: Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott at 728 pages. This is book two in The Sun Chronicles. The longest non-fiction book was Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen at 576 pages. I only read 22 books that had fewer than 300 pages.
- Shortest book: The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood by Alexandra Rowland, which is only 85 pages long.
- Library use: I read 34 books from the library and 26 of those were ebooks. Thank you library for saving me literally hundreds of dollars every year.
- First book: I finished Network Effect by Martha Wells on January 7.
- Last book: I finished The City in Glass by Nghi Vo on December 31 (today!).
- Fiction and non-fiction: Of the 69 books I read, one-third (23) were non-fiction, and the other two-thirds were fiction. I think my non-fiction reading increases a little year. I’m might become one of those old people who only reads non-fiction.
- Most-read Authors: Alexandra Rowland with six(!) books, then Francis Spufford, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Martha Wells with three books each.
- Gender gap: I kept track of how many books I read by men compared to women this year, as I normally do, but I didn’t purposely focus too hard on reading books by women like I have done in years past. I read 22 books by men this year. That’s one of the highest shares of male authors since I started tracking. It feels excessive. I will be recommitting to reading more women in 2025.
- Other languages: I read just two books in Spanish this year, but that’s better than zero! They were Chiapas, la rebelión indígena de México and El beso de la mujer araña.
I’m having a hard time naming many favorites this year. All the books I read are good, but they don’t all always form a new groove in my brain. The only favorites I immediately thought of were Alexandra Rowland’s books, which had me literally laughing out loud while reading. For the rest, I looked at what I rated five stars on Story Graph. I liked them a lot, I’m just not obsessed with them all! I’m not going to-rehash my thoughts on all of these books, search previous posts if you want to see what I thought about them.
The Books of 2024
Here is the list of this year’s books! If you want to see what I read in previous years, you can click the books of the year tag to see all my past annual book posts.
| Title | Author |
| Network Effect | Martha Wells |
| Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media | Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky |
| The Future | Naomi Alderman |
| Fugitive Telemetry | Martha Wells |
| Yellowface | R. F. Kuang |
| Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery | Annie Liontas |
| System Collapse | Martha Wells |
| Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business | Roxane Gay |
| The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi | Shannon Chakraborty |
| Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed | Erika Kubick |
| A Secret History of Witches | Louisa Morgan |
| January Fifteenth | Rachel Swirsky |
| The Palestine Laboratory | Antony Loewenstein |
| Chiapas, la rebelión indígena de México | Carlos Montemayor |
| The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation | Cory Doctorow |
| The Book of Love | Kelly Link |
| Shards of Earth | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
| People Collide | Isle McElroy |
| Fathomfolk | Eliza Chan |
| Eyes of the Void | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
| Cahokia Jazz | Francis Spufford |
| Lords of Uncreation | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
| Chain Gang All-Stars | Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah |
| The Magician’s Daughter | H. G. Parry |
| The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam | Marshall G. S. Hodgson |
| The Immortal King Rao | Vauhini Vara |
| Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World | Naomi Klein |
| The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center | Rhaina Choen |
| Devil’s Gun | Cat Rambo |
| Unconquerable Sun | Kate Elliott |
| Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture | Jenny Odell |
| Furious Heaven | Kate Elliott |
| Translating Myself and Others | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| Running Close to the Wind | Alexandra Rowland |
| A Taste of Gold and Iron | Alexandra Rowland |
| The Centre | Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi |
| The Ministry of Time | Kaliane Bradley |
| The End of Drum Time | Hanna Pylväinen |
| Tadek and the Princess | Alexandra Rowland |
| Hench | Nina Zine Walschots |
| El beso de la mujer araña | Manuel Puig |
| Moonbound | Robin Sloan |
| The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide | Steven W. Thrasher |
| Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America | Pekka Hämäläinen |
| Light Perpetual | Francis Spufford |
| Bunny | Mona Awad |
| Some by Virtue Fall | Alexandra Rowland |
| The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood | Alexandra Rowland |
| How Infrastructure Works | Deb Chachra |
| Vita Nostra | Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko |
| Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It | Janina Ramírez |
| Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation | Kristin Kobes Du Mez |
| The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics | Olivia Waite |
| Assassin of Reality | Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko |
| Yield under Great Persuasion | Alexandra Rowland |
| Swordcrossed | Freya Marske |
| Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism | Joanne Limburg |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| Red Plenty | Francis Spufford |
| They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent | Sarah Kendzior |
| Sistersong | Lucy Holland |
| The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America | Barrett Holmes Pitner |
| The Teleportation Accident | Ned Beauman |
| Monsignor Quixote | Graham Green |
| No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need | Naomi Klein |
| Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition | Debt Collective, Astra Taylor |
| Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times | Katherine May |
| The First Bright Thing | J. R. Dawson |
| The City in Glass | Nghi Vo |
Cats and Books
It feels right to end this post with cats as I do with my other posts. I thought for sure I would have more pictures of cats with books from the year, but apparently not. It’s going to take time to get Fritz into the high-brow academic shit that Huey read with me.
1 Comment
Comments are closed.