Originally hosted by Jamie @ Perpetual Page Turner, I like how this survey delves into the specifics of books read and gives me a chance to review all I read and wrote this year. I have completed this survey every year since I started book blogging full time (2014). I removed some questions for which I didn’t have an answer. So, be sure to visit the original post if you’d like to complete the survey. Links to reviews where applicable. My annual overview (in which I recap my goals progress and set new ones) will go live on January 3rd.
2024 Reading Stats
- Number of books read – 74. An increase over 2023 (in which I read 61 books)! Not quite back to 2022 (in which I exceed my goal of 85 books), but certainly an improvement.
- Number of re-reads – 3 (The Hobbit, Nevermoor, and Wundersmith). I had the thought a couple weeks ago, “Did I read White is for Witching this year??” Apparently not 🥲 I had started a reread of the Nevermoor series when I thought #4 was finally going to be released in the fall, but I put the brakes on that when it got pushed again to spring 2025.
- Genre you read the most from – I don’t track genres but it’s pretty much always going to be speculative fiction. This tool “My Year in Books” which pulls from Goodreads says I read 41 fantasy, 28 middle grade and 19 young adult. By my own count, I read 3 YA books this year. Probably a number of middle grade books are tagged both MG and YA. (The graphic does not include my last two reads of read 2024, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and MG novel The Wolf Wilder.)
Best in Books
- Favourite book read in 2024 – 2024 turned out to be a rather average bordering on mediocre year of reading. Many books I thought I would love fell short. Therefore, I have one of the shortest lists of favourite reads in recent years. Top of the pile is The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez (adult fantasy – HD cover included further below in ‘favourite covers’ section). Honourable mentions go to:
- Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (adult fantasy)
- A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland (adult historical fantasy)
- The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (adult short fiction)
- The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden (adult historical fantasy)
- The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (adult fantasy)
- I wasn’t going to include this as a favourite but after it kept coming up in my answers below, I decided it deserves an honourable mention.
- HD cover included further below in ‘favourite covers’ section
- Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love more but didn’t – The City in Glass by Nghi Vo. It was still a solid read, but a little more abstract than I had prepared for.
- Book you ‘pushed’ the most people to read – The Spear Cuts Through Water
- Best series started/ended/continued – The Singing Hills cycle by Nghi Vo. I read the first two volumes (The Empress of Salt & Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain) near the start of the year. In fact, this series was my answer to “One book you didn’t get to in 2023 but will make a priority in 2024” in last year’s survey 😊
- Favourite new author discovered – Hopefully Rose Sutherland! She’s just got the one novel to date but I look forward to more.
- Best book from a genre you don’t typically read – When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible by Lory Widmer Heiss (of Entering the Enchanted Castle)
- Most action-packed/thrilling/unputdownable book – It Came From the Trees by Ally Russell comes to mind. A quick creepy MG read.
- Favourite cover – The West Passage (art by Kuri Huang, design by Christine Foltzer) is a clear winner this year. I spent a lot of time investigating this cover when I had the book out from the library. Honourable mentions: The Spear Cuts Through Water (art by Simon Prades), Haunt Sweet Home (design by Esther S Kim), and The Divorcées (mostly because I want to be lounging in a pool with a book).
- Most beautifully written – The Spear Cuts Through Water. Despite some violent moments, I felt like I was floating in a watery dream world while reading this book.
- Most thought-provoking/life changing – Usually I give this to a non-fiction read but I had few of those in 2024! No answer this year.
- Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2024 to finally read – Prisoner of Ice and Snow by Ruth Lauren. On my owned-TBR for over six years…
- Shortest book – Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (111 pages)
- Longest book – The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (2nd ed.) edited by Humphrey Carpenter (708 pages)
- Book that shocked you the most – When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. It wasn’t quite shocking, per se, but it definitely had an unexpected turn.
- Favourite non-romantic relationship – the diverse friendships protagonist Riley has with Lucy, Hannah and Jen (not to mention her brother Devin) in Jamie Formato’s MG Roll for Intiative.
- Favourite book by an author you’ve read previously – Tidal Creatures (Alchemical Journeys #3) by Seanan McGuire. It was soooooooo lovely to revisit Roger and Dodger 😭
- Best debut – Toss up between The West Passage and A Sweet Sting of Salt
- Best world-building – The West Passage. I may not have always understood it, but it impressed me.
- Most fun to read – Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison
- Made you cry – Unexpectedly, Just Lizzie by Karen Wilfrid. There’s a scene where the girls are practicing escaping a man who’s pretending to attack them for the final class of their self-defense training and one of the girl freezes up and it was 🥺
- Hidden gem – Going to carry on with my 2023 practice and shout out some 2024 middle grade releases which all have less than 150 Goodreads ratings: The Kodiaks: Home Ice Advantage by David A. Robertson, Misadventures in Ghosthunting by Melissa Yue, and Crushing It by Erin Becker.
- Most unique – The West Passage. Look, I try not to repeat answers in this survey, but this funky book took the cake in a number of ways.
- Made you the most mad (doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t like it!) – Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick. You can guess why lol.
Your Bookish Life
- New favourite book blog discovered – I barely kept up with the all the blogs I’ve been following since pre-2024, but I have been adding a ton of new-to-me blogs to my feed reader. These I mostly discovered via Bluesky or comments/recommendations on other folks’ blogs. I feel like book blogging has made a wee resurgence in 2024?? Or maybe I just got better at finding blogs of my interests, lol. Here is a random sampling of the ~60 blogs I’ll be checking out.
- Favourite review – The Color of Revenge by Cornelia Funke. Very fun to revisit a new entry into my oldest favourite series.
- Favourite non-review post – A Falling Letters Timeline [10th Blogiversary Celebration]
- Favourite bookish photo – Luckily I took a photo last week otherwise I don’t think I would have one!
- Best moment of bookish/blogging life – The migration of bookish folks to Bluesky in November inspired me. This wasn’t specific to me personally, but it lifted my spirits about engaging with the book community in recent weeks!
- Most challenging thing about blogging/reading life – Hmmm. This year I’ll go with ever-changing daily/weekly schedules. My lifestyle is super seasonal and I can never quite find a blogging rhythm that lasts for more than a month or two.
- Most viewed post – Would You Rather: Book Edition (2,532 views – roughly 700 more than in 2023) was published in Sept 2020. Most viewed post published this year (in February) is Bad Cree [Family Reads] (636 views).
- Post you wished got a little more love – The Beautiful Something Else by Ash Van Otterloo and Jude Saves the World by Ronnie Riley [MG Reviews]
- Best bookish discovery – This sounds basic but I’m going with Storygraph challenges… this was the first year I participated in one (for middle grade reading throughout the year). I enjoyed tracking my reads through there.
- Completion of challenges/goals – To be discussed in my “wrapping up, looking forward post” on January 3rd.
Looking Ahead
- Most anticipated debut – The Song of Orphan’s Garden by Nicole M. Hewitt (of Feed Your Fiction Addiction)
- Most anticipated sequel – Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor #4) by Jessica Townsend. This is the fourth year in a row that Silverborn has been the answer to this question 😀 But now it has a cover! (One that seems to me lacklustre in comparison to the previous three covers, anyway…) Hopefully next year I can give a answer to this question…
- Most anticipated non-debut – Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo (companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful)
- One book you didn’t get to in 2024 but will make a priority in 2025 – I can’t think of any book that I was keen to read in 2024 which I didn’t. However, I did recently comment on someone’s blog that I may pick up Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi in 2025.
- 2024 release you’ve read and recommend – Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Wayward Children #10) by Seanan McGuire
- One goal for your reading/blogging life – strike a better balance between writing my own blog posts and commenting on other blogs
And that’s a wrap on 2024! Other bloggers who hae completed this survey include Alicia @ A Kernel of Nonsense, Annemieke @ A Dance with Books and Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction. Let me know if you fill it out.
Happy New Year! 🎉 See you on the other side 😄
I like the way you compiled your list. Using superlatives as reasons why you enjoyed or disliked a book is very creative and very blunt. You read A LOT of cool looking books (many of them are on my TBR Stack) this year!
Thank-you! 😊 It’s fun a way to explore a different perspective on the past year’s reading. Hope you get to enjoy some of these in 2025!
Hey, thanks for mentioning my book! I had a hard time picking favorites this year. One of the novels that impressed me the most was the one I finished on New Years Eve, The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting. Otherwise, I found a lot of reads were disappointing or just OK. Going to check out Bluesky now … I created an account ages ago but then forgot about it. I’d be happy if there were some bookish action there.
You’re welcome! I’m not sure what it was about 2024 that made the reads so middling… hopefully we find better reads in 2025. It’s nice that you were able to end on a high note. The Bell in the Lake sounds like my sort of historical fiction. You might find more familiar faces on Bluesky now than when you first signed up.
I bought The Spear Cuts Through Water a couple of months ago and am eager to get to it. So many of my favorite bloggers and bookstagrammers loved it. It Came from the Trees is one I have been eyeing. I didn’t pick up enough mg books this year. Thank you for sharing all these amazing reads with us. Hope you have a wonderful New Year!
Oh excellent, I am sure you will enjoy THE SPEAR! IT CAME FROM THE TREES had some solidly scary moments for a MG. I liked the girl scouts premise. Happy New Year 😊
Thanks for the shout out! The Warm Hands of Ghosts was one of my favorites this year too. 🙂
You’re welcome! Thanks for stopping by 😊
I’ve been doing this wrap-up for years too. Time to create one for 2024! Thanks for mentioning THE SONG OF ORPHAN’S GARDEN – hope you love it!!
Excellent, I see your survey is up now! I’ll have to pop over now 😁
Thanks for the “My Year in Books” tool. Another interesting perspective on a year’s reading. I discovered I am a “nature nurturer” (no surprise there though).
Glad you enjoyed it! The auras are a fun feature.
Oh, that’s me XD Hi!
A lot of the books you read I really would like to check out this year!!
Hello 😁 Thanks for stopping by! Hope you get to enjoy some of these in 2025 🙂