I enjoy tracking my reading on Goodreads – I’ve been doing it since 2013 – and this year I also signed on to The StoryGraph because I like pie charts and they have nice ones. I’m working on a book list for 2025, but before I publish that, I thought I’d share how 2024 went. For nerd posterity.
According to Goodreads, I read 90 books and 29,869 pages in 2024. The shortest was Lumberjanes by N.D. Stevenson (loved it) and the longest was Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (did not love it).
I tended to avoid any ratings at all this year, for a few reasons. One was that it feels unfair to rate a book anything other than 5 stars without some sort of explanation as to why it didn’t get the pinnacle of my regard. The other was that I read very fast and loose this year, catching little pockets of reading time all over the place, and I didn’t often have an opportunity to truly consider all the points I like to consider for a thoughtful review.
Near the end of the year I did have a friend ask me to start rating again, because they used my ratings a sort of litmus test about whether they’d enjoy a book. So I meted out some stars with very brief explanations in Goodreads.
All that is to say my ratings were quite high this year, mostly because I only noted 5 star reads. My average at the end of the year was 4.6 stars.
I avoided audiobooks, so mostly everything on my shelf was read with my eyes instead of my ears. I’m actually more relieved of this than I expected to be – a few books that I quite liked apparently had awful narrations so I saved myself some grief by using the ol’eyeballs.
A few books I really enjoyed:
- Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth by Ben Francisco
- Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
- The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
- Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
- The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall
- The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
- Starter Villain by John Scalzi
According to StoryGraph I read most books in 2 days. I like books with a mix of adventure and mystery, and it’s a bonus when they’re funny as well. Medium-paced, medium-length books are the majority of what I read (slow and huge are my least favorite). Overwhelmingly, I read fiction, equal parts mysteries and Young Adult books. Anthony Horowitz and Ellery Adams were the two authors I read most. April was my “most read” month (15 books!).
Next week I’ll post about my 2025 Reading List. It’s filled with a lot that’s been on my TBR list for some time, and with a lot of new. It’s a big list. I’m ambitious.