2024 End of Year Wrap Up

2024 in Books

I can’t believe that it’s already New Year’s Eve. The year has seemed short despite the days often seeming long, but in those long days, I have read a lot of good books. I didn’t get a chance to write a post about every book I loved this year, but here’s a quick look at my reading stats for the year. Just a reminder—I use The Storygraph to track my reading, so if you want this kind of data for your own reading, I highly recommend it.

First up were my reading goals. Back in January, I set a goal to read at least 215 books, 50,000 pages, and listen to at least 100 hours of audiobooks. The book and page goals turned out to be pretty good estimates of what I was capable of, but this was the first year I have used the audiobook goal feature and I way underestimated how many hours of audiobooks I listen to. I believe this feature is also based on the provided length of the audiobook when listened to on normal speed, but I typically listen on 1.75 speed, so I definitely didn’t put in as many hours as the data indicates. I think the pages goal and hours goal are only added to depending on the format of the book I logged, but it is unclear since they both say 242 books.

Apparently, it took me an average of 4 days to read a book, which makes sense because I’m usually reading one book and listening to another at any given time. I read a wide variety of moods as reported by myself and other readers. I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction this year because I really struggled to get into more serious and informative nonfiction reads.

I read and listened to a lot of mid-length books this year with more than half of my reads being under 300 pages and most of my listens being between 8 and 16 hours. I feel like I read a lot of books that have been published within the last year or two and books seem to be getting shorter these days.

I am still going strong with reading physical books over digital or audiobooks. Physical is still my format of choice and I am still buying a lot of used books, not to mention the physical books I borrow from the library. There just really isn’t a good equivalent of the used book market for audiobooks or epubs, so often buying physical books is cheaper. I borrow most of the ebooks and audiobooks I read from the library and as much as I love Libby and Hoopla, they are not as easy to casually browse if you aren’t sure exactly what you are looking for as the physical library is either.

In terms of the authors I read the most this year, I didn’t have a lot of repeats. By far, my most read author was L.M. Montgomery from where I read and reviewed the Anne of Green Gables books back in August. I read Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Wives series in November and December and despite the series being 6 books all of which were over 400 pages, I never really decided if I liked the series or not. I read Stephen Graham Jones’s Indian Lake Trilogy. I didn’t really care for the first one, but liked the subsequent books much better. I really enjoyed Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered, which I reviewed for the blog, but I also loved her Starling House (review coming in 2025), and A Mirror Mended. I read most of Sadeqa Johnson’s backlist before and after meeting her at the West Virginia Book Festival. I also read all three of Paige Lavoie’s Mothman in Love series. I reviewed the first one for the blog, but didn’t like the second or third nearly as much due to high fantasy elements, so skipped reviewing those.

Finally some graphs just for fun. The first one shows the breakdown of books read, pages read, and hours listened for each month of the year and the other one shows the breakdown of how I rated my books this year. Like for the blog, I don’t review everything I read on The Storygraph. Usually if I’m going to rate a book below a three, I just don’t bother to rate it at all, but there were three books I did rate a 2 this year because I wanted to make a point. I will not name those here.

I had 46 5-star rated books this year and it’s hard to narrow them down, but here is what I think my top 10 books of 2024 (in no particular order) are:

1. What You Are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

2. Ejaculate Responsibly by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

3. Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains by Rosalie Haizlett

4. Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

5. Rednecks by Taylor Brown

6. The Rhododendron Society by Jessica Nuckles

7. Funny Story by Emily Henry

8. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

9. The Sign for Home by Blair Fell

10. Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Thank you so much for spending another year reading with me! I already have some posts written for 2025 and I’m looking forward to trying something a little different with the blog next year (more on that soon). I’d love it if you stuck around. I’m closing the book on 2024 and wishing you and yours a very happy, healthy, and abundant new year filled with lots of great books!