I love going back over the list of books I’ve read in the past year. Enough time has passed since the first few for it to be a nice reminder and I get to see how the last few stack up against the rest of the year’s reading. I intentionally don’t post a rating of what I read, just a few thoughts when I finish it.

Overview

This was another year of highlighting the pitfalls of counting number of books. On the short end, All Systems Red is around 30k words and the long end has Words of Radiance over 400k, both counting as 1 book. I figure those all balance out in the end. This year I have a caveat to the number of books I read. There are 42 entries on my reading list, but I actually read 48 books. The Giver Quartet is four books, but I bought a version that has all four bound together with a single ISBN. I also grouped Nothing is Promised as a single entry because the four books are so tightly linked. Ultimately this doesn’t matter because I’m not looking for a books-read goal, it’s just interesting to think about. So I read either 42 or 48 books in 2024 depending on how you count.

Compared to 2023, I read 6 more books, but I had a much larger proportion of fiction. I read 13 non-fiction books in 2023, but only 5 in 2024. This wasn’t intentional, I usually had a deep enough list of fiction books I wanted to read that I didn’t seek out as much non-fiction. I will try to bring some of that balance back in 2025 though.

category	2022	2023	2024
fiction	6	23	37
nonfiction	7	13	5

I also keep track of whether I read the book on paper, read the ebook, or listened to the audibook. Most books I read are ebooks because I get a lot through the library or they’re cheaper than buying the paper copy. I don’t re-read books often so I’m selective about what books I want taking up physical space.

Here are the counts broken down by year:

format	2022	2023	2024
audiobook	1	1	8
ebook	4	21	21
paper	8	14	13

I think it’s interesting that my number of ebooks remained the same from 2023 to 2024, but I listened to signficantly more audiobooks. Thanks library! That contributed a lot to reading more books this year because audiobooks aren’t replacing other reading time because I mostly listen while washing dishes or cleaning.

Looking at the percentages of books read by each format I think the most interesting change is the percentage of paper books falling from 2022. At the point I was just getting back into reading consistently and I mostly read books I already had.

Favorites and Least Favorites

As a bit of reflection I like to highlight my favorite and least favorite books each year. My big takeaway this year is that I read a lot of really good books. Picking favorites was difficult.

Fiction

After much deliberation, my favorite fiction book of the year was Oathbringer. When I sat down to make the list I thought it would be an obvious winner, but I read a lot of excellent fiction this year. The honorable mentions for individual books are A Memory Called Empire and This is How You Lose the Time War. I loved both of those books, and I know it’s a very basic answer but Oathbringer just edged them out slightly. The Stormlight Archive books are really good and Oathbringer is my favorite so far. For series, I loved Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books, but couldn’t pick out any single one which stood above the rest. Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books are also great.

My least favorite fiction book was Black Girl White Girl, which was just bad.

Non-Fiction

I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year, but all the books I read were good. My favorite by a massive margin was Brading Sweetgrass. That books will definitely go on the list of books which changed the way I think about the world. It is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

I have to call out two honorable mentions, which is funny because we’re now over half the non-fiction books I read in the year. Paved Paradise and The Order of Time are both excellent.

There’s no least favorite on the list this year, because they were all good.