2024: the reading year in review

I greet you with a traditional December reading round up post.

This year my reading aim was to try and crack through as many books in my tbr pile as possible. Even writing this, I realise it sounds both ambitious and futile. But I was feeling stuck with my reading and wanted to move through the backlog. I added them to an Excel spreadsheet and put the numbers through a random number generator – whatever came up, I would read. Often I choose books based on how I’m feeling and this often means that I never quite feel in the mood for, say, something about drug addicts or war or something difficult.

All readers have this perennial problem of clearing the tbr. I admire the people who lean into this and just accumulate but in practice, I want to read as many books as possible and I have a small house and this just isn’t compatible.

I don’t know what it would be like, nor do I want to know, how it would feel with no books lined up to read, so as admirable as this idea was in theory, in practice, I still bought or borrowed books throughout the year. The tbr pile is still there but there has been a lot of turnover so I’m calling it a mostly successful experiment.  

Has the spreadsheet method taught me anything? Well, yes. I started the year with 70 fiction books on there and end it with 30, and started with 30 non-fiction and end it with 20.

Lesson 1: I need to be more disciplined with non-fiction

So, the first lesson is that I like the idea of reading non-fiction but not the practice.

Lesson 2: I need to buy less on impulse and spend more time browse reading

I didn’t finish a lot of books (marked red on the spreadsheet) so there’s an argument for better quality control when buying, spending time browsing and looking through the first few pages to see if I like the style and so on. I will not waste time on a book I’m not enjoying and having such a high discard rate has certainly made me think – it was about 49/51 read/ discard which is pretty poor.

Lesson 3: I either need to lean into ebooks or give up altogether

A lot of the still unread books are on my kindle app. What tends to happen is that I note the cheap 99p deals on ebooks, buy them and send them to the app but I really don’t like reading on the app and the books are easy to ignore because they don’t take up space.

Discernment and quality control, then, are the lessons of 2024’s reading. But what did I read and what are my books of the year?

My stats are all over the place. Goodreads says I’ve read 105 books this year, while The Storygraph says it’s only 99. My notebook tracker suggests 105 books.

I’ve decided to go with the notebook, simply for ease of counting without scrolling. 105 books it is. The breakdown is as follows:

38 books by men, 65 by women, 1 by a non-binary writer and 1 compilation of essays.

If I’m honest, I don’t feel it’s been a vintage reading year. I don’t have a single book of the year this year, simply because I didn’t feel I’d read anything that stood out and stuck with me the way books have in previous years. (Last year’s books of the year was Middlemarch, closely followed by Demon Copperhead, a classic and a rewrite of a classic – what does that tell you about modern publishing?)

This is a list of books I’ve enjoyed this year. They are in no particular order. And they are as follows:

• Orbital – Samantha Harvey
• My Monticello – Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
• A Heart That Works – Rob Delaney
• O Brother – John Niven
• Remarkably Bright Creatures – Shelby Van Pelt
• How Westminster Works (and Why it Doesn’t) – Ian Dunt
• Playground – Richard Powers (in the list despite me still not being sure what happened at the end)
• Openings – Lucy Caldwell

These are all excellent books. They are well written, entertaining, all of them tackling difficult subjects and telling a bigger truth about humans and the state of the world and how we can interact better.

I’ve read a lot of average books this year. One reason for tackling the tbr pile, aside from trying to clear some clutter in my house, was to avoid rushing to try books that have been hugely hyped by the book industry, the next big thing, the best book ever and so on. Earlier this year I read a book that was hyped, and I thought it was alright; just alright, not great, but well written and ok if you like that sort of thing. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t buy into the hype either. The book had enough of a quirk to be a dream for book marketers – a lovely hook to build a campaign on and it was fine. It just wasn’t quite for me. My Goodreads review was brief. The author sent me a direct message on Twitter suggesting it was a spiteful review born of bitterness because I wasn’t published.

I mean, don’t do this, authors.

But I do kind of understand. Everything seems so combative these days that perhaps it’s easy to believe someone would post a review out of spite. I didn’t. I’m happy for anyone who gets published. Having tried and failed, I know how difficult it is, and it isn’t a competition. I know how galling it is to put hours of work into something and find that someone didn’t love it – who better to know this than a rejected writer? I would never post a review out of spite or jealousy or bitterness, and as I said, I didn’t hate the book, I just didn’t love it as much as other people did. That isn’t unusual. (The impact of someone thinking I would do this out of spite stuck with me for days and was upsetting enough for me to delete the review. So there you go, hounding reviewers and insulting them works. But please don’t do it anyway.)

This is a long-winded way of saying I need to consider what I’m reading even more next year. Marketing be damned. I want to read immersive impressive books that make me think and laugh and that stay with me. I could reread Middlemarch every year, which wouldn’t be a chore, but I also want more and new – to me – things that are absorbing and thoughtful.

Looking at the books I have still to read in the house, I feel fairly confident there are absorbing entertaining reads in there. There’s bound to be a few duds. But let’s look forward to reading in 2025 – bold swooping brave fiction.