Even though I’ve had this spreadsheet on various computers for the whole time, and I enter data into it every few weeks, I am a bit astonished to see that my reading tracking has now completed a 17th year.
This was a very, very good year in books for me. I read 21 total, with both the number of pages read and days to read each book tracking well ahead of average. Most importantly, there were only a couple of books that in retrospect I would consider skipping, while choosing my favorites from the group turned out to be an excruciating exercise.
Without further ado, the full list:
–Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
–Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
–Best Short Stories of Jack London by Jack London
–El Faro del fin del Mundo by Jules Verne
–Predicting the Winner by Ira Chinoy
–There’s Always Next Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
–The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
–Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
–The Universal Baseball Association Inc by Robert Coover
–The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
–The Measure by Nikki Erlick
–Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
–The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
–Bookstories by Sarah Tollok
–South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
–Just Like You by Nick Hornby
–My Fourth Time We Drowned by Sally Hayden
–The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
–America and Americans by John Steinbeck
–The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
–Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
If I absolutely had to pick favorites, I would recommend Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Cloud Cuckoo Land, There’s Always This Year, Born to Run, My Fourth Time We Drowned and Between Two Kingdoms, in some order.
It is much easier to say I would have left off America and Americans, South of the Border West of the Sun and Jack London. None were terrible, but at some point during each I found myself counting the pages remaining and wondering how long it would take to get to my next book.
The longest book was Cloud Cuckoo Land at 626 pages. El Faro del fin del Mundo took me the longest to read (54 days) entirely due to the fact that it was in Spanish. The Time Machine was the shortest (118 pages) and quickest (3 days) read of the year.
Only three years had more total pages, while this year tied for the most books I’ve read in the book-tracking era. Five of the books I borrowed from the library.
I also joined Storygraph this year (in addition to Goodreads), and the breakdown of the moods it provides from the 2024 reads certainly feels right: reflective, emotional, informative and adventurous.
I’ve got a healthy TBR stack ready for what I hope will be an equally great 2025, and wish you a relective, emotional and perhaps even hopeful reading year.