I can’t believe 2024 is already drawing to an end! This has been another great reading year for me. While not quite the high of 2023—which I called one of the best reading years of my adult life—I’m quite happy with both the quality and quantity of books I read this year.
As of this writing, I have just surpassed my numerical reading goal for the year of 50 books and hope to still squeeze a couple more in before New Years. You can see the full list of books I’ve read on my StoryGraph here. As I discussed in my 2023 recap post, I fully abandoned Goodreads and have switched to StoryGraph as the primary site where I log my reading. Though I stopped writing in-depth reviews for every single book I read, I still struggle with keeping my StoryGraph up to date as I finish each book rather than building up a backlog of books that need to be added all at once. I also completely failed to keep my Book Snake up to date. Last year was my first time creating a crocheted Book Snake as a color-coded-by-genre log of the books I’ve read and I found it really fun and motivating. This year, though, I seem to have just lost my enthusiasm and have fallen desperately behind in updating it. I did add some new yarn colors to better represent the genres I read (I separated out thrillers from mysteries and added a new category for graphic novels). But overall, I found the Book Snake more of a hindrance than a boon this time around, since I still felt pressure to avoid reading two books of the same genre in a row but didn’t have the benefit of extra motivation. I will not be making a Book Snake again next year (which is just as well because I’ll eventually run out of places to put giant crochet snakes…), but I do want to carry forward an awareness of what genres I’m reading and make an effort to shake it up when I notice I’m falling into a rut.
What’s new for me this year, in terms of tracking books, has been also keeping a reading log through the organization app Notion. I really enjoy the way this app allows you to completely customize how you organize your notes. It came pre-set with a file labeled “Reading List,” in which you can add a list of entries that can then be linked to individual files for each book. I added color-coded tags for each entry to label their status, genre, what format I read them in (audio, print, or ebook), and whether I reviewed or plan to review them. I also added checkboxes for whether I’ve added each book to StoryGraph or to my Book Snake yet. This gives me a really nice spreadsheet, where I can see at a glance all the books I’ve read or started so far and what genres I’ve read recently, which really helps when I’m picking out my next book. Then I can open up each file to take notes while I read. I’ve been really loving this method and wish I could just use Notion alone, but I do like the social aspect of using a public site like StoryGraph. I’ve grown pretty dissatisfied lately with StoryGraph’s questionnaire for each book (the questions are vague, subjective, and often irrelevant), but I do enjoy the pie charts it gives at the end of the year! I was particularly amused by my Mood chart this year, which shows that I categorized the vast majority of books I read as either “dark,” “mysterious,” or “tense.” As I expected, my Genre chart for the year shows that fantasy, horror, and romance were my top genres, but classics, thrillers, and historical fiction weren’t too far behind.
I was particularly interested to see how different formats of books stacked up next to each other this year, so after keeping track via the tags in Notion, I then painstakingly switched to the audio edition on StoryGraph for all books that I read entirely or mostly as audiobooks, so that I could see what percentage it came out to. The graph isn’t perfectly accurate because I found some titles didn’t have their audiobook listed on StoryGraph, and I also bounced between formats for a couple of books. (I didn’t really bother to track print vs ebook.) But as I expected to see, about 60 percent of my reading this year was through audiobooks. As I’ve noted over the past couple of years, reading more and more in audio has vastly increased how many books I am able to get through. I love that I can multitask and read while I wash dishes or clean. It also helps me to switch gears and get out of “editor brain” when I’ve been reading a lot for work. In fact, I’ve found that nearly all of my reading for pleasure this year was in audio, while many of my print and ebook slots were taken up by books for my day job—whether reading classic mysteries for our American Mystery Classics book club or reading Advance Reader Copies of books whose publicity campaigns I’m working on. The downside of doing most of my leisure reading in audio is that it’s a lot harder to get through my review requests for this blog in a timely manner. If I accepted an ARC from you this year and have yet to review it, I’m so sorry! As I noticed myself falling behind, I’ve started to really scale back the number of review requests that I accept. These days, I’m more likely to review books after they come out rather than meticulously planning my reviews for the Monday before publication, like I used to. That being said—authors and publicists, if you have Advance Listening Copies available, please send them my way!
One other new change in my reading habits that doesn’t show up in any of my StoryGraph charts is that I’ve been reading a lot more plays than I usually would. That’s entirely due to the Lambs book club, which I mentioned having just started a couple of months before my recap post last year. My favorite of these was Blithe Spirits by Noël Coward, which was a hilarious drama about a séance gone wrong. I also read several novels that were outside of my usual genre comfort zones but feel like cultural staples due to their famous adaptations, like Auntie Mame.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of my favorite books that I read this year was Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas. You can never go wrong with a good vampire novel, especially when a talented author does something so new and different with them. I’ll have to make sure I get her debut novel, The Hacienda, on next year’s reading list. My favorite author of the year was probably Naomi Novick. She’s definitely my most-read author of the year as I devoured her Scholomance series and also read her new short story collection, Buried Deep. Not far behind Naomi Novick was the romance author Cat Sebastian. I found I’ve been reading a lot of historical romance novels lately as palate cleansers between other genres and just whenever I need a little treat. It’s great to have a prolific and reliable author like Cat as a go-to, but I also discovered several new authors I enjoyed in my quest for historical romances. One was Chasity Bowlin, whose Gothic romance House of Shadows has echoes of Jane Eyre and features a desperate heroine who finds herself engaged to a man whose family may be cursed and whose house may be haunted. I also revisited an author I’d read once before, Mimi Matthews. I’d enjoyed her clever gender-swapped John Eyre a few years ago and was equally charmed this year by The Matrimonial Advertisement, which uses a romance plot as a lens to explore the dangers of institutionalization and mental health care (or lack thereof) in the Victorian era.
As for how I did with last year’s goals: I’m still struggling to make a dent in my TBR shelf of physical books, and in fact I couldn’t resist picking up some new books when I went to the mystery/thriller conference BoucherCon for the first time this year. The pile towers ever taller… I read the same number of nonfiction books as last year, but I particularly enjoyed the two that I read: Mortimer and the Witches (a study of nineteenth-century fortune telling in New York) and Dark Archives (an investigation of real and alleged books bound in human skin). But most importantly, I did follow through with my blogging goal from last year of switching to an every-other-week posting schedule. This has definitely saved me a lot of stress, though it does mean that fewer than half of the books I read actually get reviewed on the blog.
Next year, my main reading goal is to just loosen up more and read what I’m excited about, instead of feeling constrained by genres or specific challenges. I do want to get back into reading series, now that I won’t be afraid of unbalancing my book snake by reading too many books in the same genre in a row. I also want to try to find a good system for making better progress on the books sent to me for review, even if that means seeking them out in audio form after the release date. Lastly, I’ll be setting the same numerical goal of 50 books, since I think that worked out well.
How did you do with your reading goals this year? What goals will you be setting for 2025? Let me know in the comments!