2024 in Books
This is a followup to last year’s 2023 in Books post where I said
My resolution for 2023 is to get back to reading at least a book a week … I think the way to read more is to try and figure out the books that are going to become 5s and seek those out.
Mission accomplished! Well, I read 50 books which is very close to a book a week. That’s what I said I wanted to do, and loads more than the 39 I read last year. There were also a ton more five star reads just as I said that I wanted to do. This is a combination of two things. One is not being too precious about what gets five stars - not all these books are perfect but I really enjoyed them all. And the other thing is trying to read the stuff that I’m excited to read rather than the weird thing I do of saving things up for a special occasion. It’s not like I’m going to run out of books to read! So I’m pleased with having given fifteen books out of fifty a five star rating, that’s 30% and up from 15% last year.
The books I gave five stars to were
- Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
- A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne
- Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris
- Pay Dirt by Sara Paretsky
- Water by John Boyne
- Rivers of Power by Laurence C. Smith
- The Sweet Shop Owner by Graham Swift
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Earth by John Boyne
- Any Human Power by Manda Scott
- Body Tourists by Jane Rogers
- Nothing But Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
- The Mapmaker’s Wife by Hannah Evans
- Roaring Girls by Holly Kyte
- Fire by John Boyne
The standout is obviously the four books by John Boyne. The fourth volume in the Elements series looks like a shoo-in for five star rating in 2025 - but I did give the only other book I read by Boyne this year only two stars so he’s not getting them without earning them! I’m pleased that there were two non fiction books in there as well as all the fiction.
Storygraph tells me that my most popular read of the year was Educated which I wouldn’t have expected. It was an odd book for me to read as memoirs aren’t really my thing but I kind-of enjoyed that one, I was pleased the author got to tell the story, and obviously other people like this stuff more than me. The least popular read was the Graham Swift, maybe surprising for someone I consider very readable for a Booker Prize winning author, maybe not. And the highest rated was The Mapmaker’s Wife, which pleases me immensely since it was a lovely book and I’m glad other people liked it as well.
For 2024 I don’t have any exciting goals, really I just want to keep reading at much the same pace, books are somehow much better when you get through them regularly. Reading something stretched over months is rarely a good experience.
Science fiction was top of the genres last year and I’m surprised it’s vanished this year with Literary appearing instead and Mystery back on top. I’m never clear how crime and mystery are different from each other and they are definitely what I reach for when I want an easy read but there’s not much of either in my five star reads. 
After a burst of enthusiasm in January my reading was pretty steady through the year until other things crowded in on me too much in December and let the (reading) year end badly.
This year my mood map is pretty flat but I think low on the graph, meaning that I’ve tended towards whatever Storygraph reckons are darker books for the whole year. That blows up my idea based on previous years that I read more when I read lighter stuff.
One other bit of data that’s interesting to me, though not something I’m tracking at Storygraph is that I only read seven ebooks in 2024. The other books were all on paper, thirty-one of them were library books! Of the twelve remaining books three were gifts, two were old books of my partner’s picked off the shelves at home, two were books I had bought before 2024 and five were new books I bought during the year. Four of the five new books I bought earned five stars from me so that seems a pretty good use of resources!
