That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2024 Edition

So this year, as it does every year, Goodreads compiled a list of the books I read, making a nice little ― or not so little ― tapestry of covers, along with a few details. You can check out the list at Goodreads here, or look at the screen shots below. The advantage of visiting the list at Goodreads is that you can interactively click on individual books to see their entries; the advantage of viewing the screen shots is you get to go make a nice hot cup of tea while waiting for them all to finish loading. Let’s review a few notes about this year’s list!

• This year’s longest book, The Reality Dysfunction (★), clocked in at 1,223 pages. This is even longer than last year’s longest book, the “Quadrail” series by Timothy Zahn, and that was a collection of three books. This is one freaking book and it’s longer. Also, as you can maybe tell by the rating, I absolutely hated it and bailed out partway through. I didn’t have a lot of luck with the other Hamilton book I attempted this year, either, The Temporal Void (★★), which is unusual for Peter F. Hamilton, as I usually love his stuff (Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, Great North Road, Fallen Dragon, etc.), but I think it may be time for an extended vacation from his doorstoppers, at least until he gets himself a new editor.
• This year’s shortest book was The Only Great Harmless Thing (★★★★), which was about elephants being forced to paint watch and instrument dials with radium to make them luminescent back around the turn of the 20th century. Yes, really. Okay I’m being a bit reductive, but still: Yes, really.
• My least popular book this year was That Wicked Apple (★★★), by Rob E. Boley, which I guess could be loosely put into the category of revisionist takes on classic literature, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In this case, the revision is that after receiving a kiss from Prince Charming, the lovely Snow White does not come back as Snow White, but rather as a ravening zombie. A ravening fast zombie. Hilarity ensues.
• My most popular book was something called Jane Eyre (★★★★). Maybe you’ve heard of it.
• I stayed pretty steady with the page count, with 22,252 pages read this year. Of course, some of that includes DNFs, including (did I mention?) over 1,200 pages of hot garbage The Reality Dysfunction, which The StoryGraph will be calling me out on later in the post.
• The book I read this year that was most highly-rated by the Goodreads community was Boy’s Life (★★★★), by Robert R. McCammon, which has an average Goodreads rating of 4.48. The deal with McCammon is that I read, or attempted to read, a number of his horror novels and hated all of them, and in my snarky one-or-two-sentence writeup of the last one* I said I was going to skip the remaining McCammon books I already had; but a friend said I should give Boy’s Life a try because it wasn’t like the others. So I did, and they were right.
• My average rating for this year came in at 3.1 stars, which makes it a pretty good year for me, since I grade books much more harshly than I do movies. This year, my ★★★★★-rated books were The Shadow of the Wind, 84K, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Rosewater. Not all of these books are rated ★★★★★ on The StoryGraph, however.
• I didn’t read anything this year that I liked as much as Perhaps the Stars last year, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be The Shadow of the Wind.

Here’s the complete breakdown of my ratings at Goodreads this year:

And now, without further ado, here is the Year In Books That Was for 2024:

Next up, we have stats from The StoryGraph, a new-ish alternative to Goodreads that, among other things, actually still lets people look at it without requiring them to make an account (a restriction adopted by both Goodreads and Last.fm in the last several years, possibly to stop their data from being scraped by bots, or possibly just to be dickish). This makes The StoryGraph much easier to use for sharing book information, and, as another benefit, the StoryGraph also supports fractional star ratings in 0.25 increments, allowing the obsessive data collectors such as myself to leave much more accurate scores. The StoryGraph also provides a year-end wrap-up, which has a bunch of new features as opposed to last year, I think. And look! It has, as the name of the site would suggest, graphs! (For the online version, which includes the ability to drill down into categories if you are that manner of data nerd, click here.)

And that was the year in books for 2024! Stay tuned next week for the year in music, with stats provided by Last.fm, which—unlike some music services I could mention—provides the year-end statistics at the end of the year, where they belong.

* The book was Usher’s Passing (★) and what I said about it was, “If you’re a horror writer and you write a book where the main character is a horror writer whose cartoonishly unpleasant relatives constantly mock him for being a horror writer because he ‘can’t write real books’, I’m going to assume you have some sort of axe to grind with your family. (Also, I’m probably going to skip the remaining McCammon books I already have on my reader …)”