With 2024 coming to a close, it’s time for the year-end wrap-ups that so many online services now send out. I’m always interested in comparing those year-over-year to see if I changed, improved (if relevant), etc., so here’s a look at my reading habits over 2024.
The Goal
As you may recall from last year, I had a a goal of reading 30 books and only managed to make my way through 14 of them for a variety of reasons. This year, I set a more conservative goal of 20 books and managed to read… 15. Many of the issues that took a chunk out of my reading in 2023 still applied this year. I was often very busy with work, especially toward the latter half of the year, and by the time I would finish up for the day I had little energy for much beyond zoning out in front of the TV with a mindless show, sporting event, or video game. Reading was an activity more frequently reserved for weekends.
For better or worse, sports also ended up taking a bigger chunk of my time than I would have guessed. This past year I started to follow baseball seriously again for the first time in over a decade. I ended up watching nearly every game my local team (the Cincinnati Reds) and my OG team (the Pittsburgh Pirates) played throughout the season. At 162 games per season, that’s a lot of time that I was watching baseball and not reading.
The Results
This year the results were eerily similar to last year:
Both my shortest and longest books were shorter than last year, though not by much with regard to the longest being Fire & Blood at 706 pages compared to The Rise Of Endymion at 722. Falling Down was the only short story I read this year; I believe it was something free from Amazon because they wanted you to end up buying the other “short stories” in the collection which ultimately make up a single, regular length novel. For those curious, no, I didn’t end up getting the others, namely because they’re only available through Amazon and not my local library.
My average book length ended up being just a little under what it was last year at 405 pages compared to 460. While books like Fire & Blood and Chasm City were on the longer side, I also had reads like Road of Bones and Moon of the Crusted Snow that were shorter novels, coming in under 200 pages.
Favorite
Picking a favorite read for 2024 is honestly very difficult as I read quite a few great books. In no particular order, I think it would have to be one of:
- Wool by Hugh Howey
- Hex by Thomas Olde Huevelt
- No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill
I started reading the Wool omnibus because I watched Silo on Apple TV (the second season of which is now available and that I really want to catch up on) and found it to be a really interesting show. As is so frequently the case, the book is much better (and that’s not to say the show is bad at all), and I really need to kick my reading into high gear so that I can read the rest of the books. The first omnibus ends well after the first season of the show, so I feel pretty confident I can watch the second season without hitting any new material.
Hex was a book I picked up simply because I saw good things online about it and author Thomas Olde Huevelt in general. It ended up being a great read, though it wasn’t until the end that I found there to be anything genuinely creepy about it. That being said, I just started reading Echo by the same author, which has immediately freaked me out. I’ve crushed through the first quarter of it in about a day; there’s a legitimate chance I finish it on January 1st.
No One Gets Out Alive was a novel I had been wanting to read since I watched the movie by the same name on Netflix several years ago; as you can likely guess, it’s been on the “to read” list for a while now. I thought the movie was really good, so I figured the book had to be better… and I couldn’t have been more right. Honestly, other than the basic concept (young woman lodging at a creepy house with an even creepier owner) the book is completely different from the novel. In fact, the second half of the novel doesn’t even happen in the film.
Between all of these, if I had to pick one book to say was the best, I’d probably be inclined to give it to Wool, but it’s honestly very close.
Looking Ahead
Obviously I don’t plan to stop reading any time soon and, similar to last year, I’d love to have more time to dedicate to it. I’m guessing that I’ll end up setting another goal of 20 books for 2025 and seeing if I can make it more of a priority. While I’m not overly happy with only reading 15 books in 2024, it’s not the worst number I could’ve hit.