2024 Reading Activity Review

This year I read 79 80 books!

• 20 21 Kindle books (one twice) [updated since I finished The Snow Song at 11pm on 31st December!]
• 2 physical books (one hardback and one paperback, both comics!)
• 28 audiobooks (13 from the library, 15 through Spotify)
• 27 comic book titles on Marvel Unlimited (as collected into trade paperbacks). I have no idea how many single issues this is, but I’m happy I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth out of that subscription!

My Goodreads reading challenge, and my Year in Books, reckon I’ve read 83 and I wasted too many hours today trying to work out why! I expect it to say 81 because I did read Rouge twice this year, but no idea where another 2 are coming in the counts!

Length

I read approximately 24,868 pages according to Goodreads (approx. because the silly way they record audiobooks throws this calculation off!). I don’t have data on how long I spent listening to audiobooks, I might start recording that myself for 2025. I think last year I experimented with Storygraph to work that out but that was such a faff and I really can’t be arsed now!

The longest book I tried to read was Memories of Ice at 925 pages (I quit at 500!), the longest I actually finished was Deadhouse Gates at 604 very, very, very fucking long pages. It felt like three times that. I could have read an additional 3-4 novels this year without those!

The shortest recorded read on Goodreads was a single Deadpool (2012) issue on Marvel Unlimited (23 pages)! The shorted ‘book’ would still be one of the comic collections for New Avengers (the trade paperback collections are roughly 100 pages). The shortest non-comic book was Foe by Iain Reid which was 208 pages!

The longest audiobook I think was White Teeth by Zadie Smith at 18 hours 34 minutes but Goodreads doesn’t hold audiobook length and I lost interest in trying to compare every one I read!

The shortest audiobook was All Systems Red, the first Murderbot Diaries book which is only 3 hours 18 mins on audio!

Fiction vs. Non-fiction

Of the 79 books the vast majority were fiction, I only read 7 non-fiction books this year:

1. Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens by David Mitchell 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
2. The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell ⭐⭐⭐⭐
3. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell ⭐⭐
4. I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) by Brené Brown ⭐⭐⭐
5. Daring Greatly by Brené Brown (never got around to sharing thoughts on this one, but much the same as the above!) ⭐⭐
6. Nothing But The Truth: Stories of Crime, Guilt and Loss of Innocence by The Secret Barrister (DNF) ⭐
7. Why Did You Stay?: A Memoir About Self-Worth By Rebecca Humphries (this was great!) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Ratings breakdown

• I only had 4 books get a full 5 star rating this year, and you can read about those, along with my favourites from my 4 star books, in my Best Reads of 2024 post.
• I rated 35 36 books at 4 stars! I think that’s really good going, and shows I’m good at picking books I’ll like!
• 19 books were middle of the road at 3 stars.
• 15 were 2 star flops, and most were comic books or audiobooks, you can read more about those as the books I rated as 1 star and couldn’t finish in my Worst Reads of 2024 post!
• Only 5 books were DNF which is usually a 1 star rating for me. I don’t think that’s bad at all!

I re-read 6 books this year

• Nemesis Games continued my rereading of The Expanse series, which I first read in 2017.
• I reread the Silo Trilogy after I first read it in 2014!
• I reread Persuasion by Jane Austen on audiobook after I read it in ebook format in 2022. I really wanted to write something for the blog about that one – because I love it! – but I never got around to it, I never even posted a review!
• I got the urge to reread The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman. I first read these as a teenager and loved them (maybe circa 2004ish).
• I re-read Rouge by Mona Awad immediately after finishing it in November!

I read a surprising number of books in series!

I’m not usually a series reader, so this was surprising!

1. The Silo Trilogy, as above. Loved these.
2. Malazan Books of the Fallen books 1-3 (three was a hard DNF!). I had a lot of thoughts on this one!
3. Pretend I’m Dead I read the sequel Vaccuum in the Dark. I don’t know if Jen Beagin will write more, but I’m up for it!
4. The Expanse series I’m now up to book 6.
5. The Murderbot Diaries I fell in love with and binged the whole lot on audio!
6. Children of Time I read the first book and I won’t continue, impressive but not for me.
7. Great Cities is the name of N.K. Jemesin’s series (might be a duology) which begins with The City We Became, unfortunately I hated it (DNF at 76%!).
8. The Sally Lockhart series I reread the first books for which was, as above, The Ruby in the Smoke.
9. I also read quite a few Marvel comic series, I’ll just group them together: The Pulse, The New Avengers 2004 and 2010, Jessica Jones 2016, The Defenders 2016 and one Deadpool 2012!

Best as audiobooks

These were better for being audiobooks:

• Unruly by David Mitchell which was read by David himself and that adds so much! It is written in his voice so you must hear it read in his voice!
• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells as read by Kevin R. Free. I just think he did a fantastic job of bringing Murderbot’s inner monologue to life.
• Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë as read by Joanne Froggatt. She’s so good at narrating audiobooks! And being a Yorkshire lass she does the accents justice. I also think I’d have struggled to focus on reading this on the page, at times it was hard enough to understand spoken aloud! Must easier to digest the melodrama while I was outside chopping down the ivy in the garden.

Book blog posts I’m proudest of

I wrote more that I have before thanks to joining in with Top Ten Tuesday. These were the ones I had the most fun writing:

• 10 Books That Got Me Excited to Read Again
• Top 10 Teen Horror (I Remember Reading)
• 10 Reading Eras: From bedtime stories to blogging!
• 9 Books I Read To Escape On The Most Painful Holiday Of My Life (Top Ten Tuesday)
• Goodreads was wrong
• Books I DNF

Loose Goals for 2025

I don’t really bother with reading goals, I tend to pluck a number out of the air for my Goodreads Reading Challenge, generally something very easily attainable and then I adjust it each time I hit it. If I keep up the comic books and audiobooks next year then 75 books should be easy to reach again (especially if I avoid the 900 page fantasy books…).

There are some book series I’d like to reread:

• Victoria E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series. The audiobook sample on Spotify sounds tolerable so I may go that route.
• Peter Cline’s Ex-Heroes. Though I am little anxious about this one, I suspect I may not like it as much!
• Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole.

I’m planning to try more on audio – particularly now I’ve worked out that I can enjoy jogging if I have a good book on! – I’ve even considered an audible subscription to supplement my Spotify 15 hours a month and whatever I can get hold of through the Library. I do remain very fussy about audiobook narrators though and that’s holding me back. There are many books I’ve rejected just from samples that I’ve not mentioned here!

I’ll be keeping my Marvel Unlimited subscription as I’m still really enjoying reading comics again. They’re so good when I have a spare few minutes and for lunch breaks. When I’ve finished with Jessica Jones I think I’m going to try to dive into X-Men.

I’d like to read more of my Kindle books than I buy new ones – this year I bought 23 and I read 20 so I’m three up! – but that may be a vain hope! At least I rarely ever spent 99p on them so that’s still only <£23 for a year of reading!

I still have a few book blog post ideas knocking around my head that I’d love to get the time to write. I’d like to write up some Top Ten Tuesday prompts ahead of time (ha!). I’d like to do more book tags because they’re fun too.

And I must get down to writing up my thoughts on Rouge – I have notes, and I get really excited when I work on those notes, it’s just time is the problem! In general, I’d love to do more literary analysis but I just have too many competing interests.

Using Obsidian for my annual review!

I had a really good time messing around with my Obsidian vault of notes to pull out all this information. Yes, I use Goodreads but actually, Goodreads is pretty shit if you want to interrogate the data (and no I’m not moving to Storygraph). I have a workflow – which one day I will share – where I sync in my GR data into my Obsidian vault. I do this as a backup and so I can pull together notes for drafting post ideas, and just making sense of my brain.

I use the dataview plugin and I was about to use that to build myself a neat little year-in-review dashboard! I am very ticked by this and I keep scrolling through it and showing my fiance how cool it is, so here is a look at some screenshots just in case I never do a post about how I built this.

Look how cool it is!

For 2025 I will try to be better at keeping my data in here clean so I don’t have to do quite so much cleanup to make it work next time! I should be able to easily copy it and just tweak the tags I use.

I love reading people’s annual review posts so if you’ve posted one, or just want to share, feel free to post in the comments!