Past Book Lists: 2023, 2022, 2021
2024 was a roller coaster of a year and so was my reading, but I am pleased to report that I once again surpassed my goal of reading 60 books in the year and reached a total of 65!
It honestly might’ve been more but three key factors conspired to slow me down in the final months of 2024- a family member’s surgery that resulted in weekly 200 mile round-trip drives and little downtime, some embroidery projects that had hard deadlines… and then there’s my Stardew obsession.
I’ve logged quite a lot of hours in the game since playing it for Earth Day and tbh part of me wants to playing it rightnow instead of writing this blog, but the rest of me knows the game will be there. And a really good book will be as compelling as the game, so it was generally only an issue when I was reading nonfiction or less-than-compelling fiction.
I read more nonfiction this year as well as some really good fantasy. In fact, I’d say the nonfiction stuck with me more than the fiction, overall- as evidenced by the number of Honorable Mentions I squeezed in below. I listened to the same number of audiobooks as last year and have a goal of listening to a few more in 2025. I find memoirs are good for long drives, though I learned not to listen to them on the way to work, just in case there is a trauma scene that suddenly appears. On the way home is fine.
There was an emphasis on wedding-themed books, both fiction/ romances set around weddings and a memoir from a comedian who planned her wedding and then wrote a book about it. This was definitely because 2024 was the year we got married ourselves! With another year to go until we have our reception, don’t be surprised if more show up on the 2025 Book List, despite at least half of them being ‘meh’ (the memoir was pretty funny, actually).
I went on a Barbara Kingsolver run and found not all of her books are created equal- one ended up on my unfinished shelf. Some of her other books are great and the nonfiction book was also fascinating- 3 ended up on my Favorites list. Lots of my interests are represented in the books below, from gardening to music to social justice to epic fantasy and space.
Still getting all these books via the Libby/ Overdrive app and the Los Angeles Public Library. The recommendations continue to come from the same sources as the past.
Some reviews and highlights on Goodreads, but there are more reviews on Facebook on my personal page- I do a monthly round up with reviews in the comments. Since that is only available to my friends, I will see what I can do about copying them over to a public forum like Goodreads going forward.
Links below are to each book at Bookshop.org which is a really great place to buy books online. Not only will I receive a small commission if you buy anything after getting there through one of my affiliate links, you can also set a local bookstore to receive a small portion of the sale as well. Supporting local bookstores instead of Amazon is using your buying power to invest in your own local community!
Favorites:
Top 5 Fiction:
- Unsheltered
- The North Woods
- Demon Copperhead
- The Lion Women of Tehran
- To Catch A Raven
- Honorable Mentions: the Emily Wilde books, He Who Drowned the World, and A Tempest of Tea.
Top 5 Nonfiction:
- The 1619 Project
- Say Nothing**
- A Life in Parts**
- Be A Revolution
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
- Honorable Mentions: Fat Talk, Predictably Irrational, Everything Now, South to America, The Great White Bard and She Memes Well. Also The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory and Filterworld, despite how unsettled they made me feel.
**(the audiobook was really great and I would recommend it over the book, but I don’t have an affiliate link for that, sorry.)
| Title | Author | Category |
|---|---|---|
| That’s Not Funny: How The Right Makes Comedy… | Matt Sienkiewicz | Nonfiction |
| The Broken Kingdoms | N.K. Jemison | Fantasy |
| The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story | Nikole Hannah-Jones | Nonfiction |
| The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less | Barry Schwartz | Nonfiction |
| The Trees | Percival Everett | Fiction |
| The North Woods | Daniel Mason | Historical Fiction |
| She Begat This: 20 Years… of Lauryn Hill* | Joan Morgan | Nonfiction |
| The Peripheral | William Gibson | Sci-Fi |
| Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of LA | Rosecrans Baldwin | Nonfiction |
| Hijab Butch Blues | Lamya H | Memoir |
| Let Us Descend | Jesmyn Ward | Fiction |
| Redshirts | John Scalzi | Sci-Fi |
| My Beloved World* | Sonja Sotomayor | Memoir |
| The Evidence of Things Not Seen | James Baldwin | Nonfiction |
| A Darker Shade of Magic | V.E. Schwab | Fantasy |
| The Most Powerful Woman In The Room Is You | Lydia Fenet | Nonfiction |
| Unsheltered | Barbara Kingsolver | Historical Fiction |
| World Without End | Ken Follet | Historical Fiction |
| The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare… | Farah Karim-Cooper | Nonfiction |
| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life | Barbara Kingsolver | Nonfiction |
| The Collapsing Empire | John Scalzi | Sci-fi |
| Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting… | Ijeoma Oluo | Nonfiction |
| The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver | Fiction |
| The Consuming Fire | John Scalzi | Sci-fi |
| She Memes Well | Quinta Brunson | Memoir |
| Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real In World Obsessed… | Whitney Goodman | Nonfiction |
| A Column of Fire | Ken Follet | Historical Fiction |
| Agency | William Gibson | Sci-fi |
| The Last Emperox | John Scalzi | Sci-fi |
| The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store | James McBride | Fiction |
| Weddiculous: An Unfiltered Guide to Being A Bride* | Jamie Lee | Nonfiction |
| This Other Eden | Paul Harding | Historical Fiction |
| Wedding Issues | Elle Evans | Romance |
| Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Passion… | John Della Volpe | Nonfiction |
| Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory…* | Patrick Radden Keffe | Nonfiction |
| The Witches Are Coming | Lindy West | Nonfiction |
| The Age of Magical Overthinking* | Amanda Montell | Nonfiction |
| A Love Song for Ricki Wilde | Tia Williams | Historical Romance |
| Wench | Dolen Perkins-Valdez | Historical Fiction |
| South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon… | Imani Perry | Nonfiction |
| It Ends With Us | Colleen Hoover | Romance |
| It Starts With Us | Colleen Hoover | Romance |
| Fair Play: A Game Changing Solution… | Eve Rodsky | Nonfiction |
| Sunshine Girl* | Julianna Margulies | Memoir |
| Regrettably, I Am About To Cause Trouble | Aimee McNee | Fiction |
| The Wind Knows My Name | Isabel Allende | Fiction |
| Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape… | Dr. Dan Ariely | Nonfiction |
| The Book of Doors | Gareth Brown | Fantasy |
| A Life in Parts* | Bryan Cranston | Memoir |
| Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver | Fiction |
| The Wedding People | Alison Espach | Fiction |
| The Lion Women of Tehran | Marjan Kamali | Historical Fiction |
| To Catch A Raven | Beverly Jenkins | Historical Romance |
| The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory | Tim Alberta | Nonfiction |
| Come and Get It | Kiley Reid | Fiction |
| Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture | Virginia Sole-Smith | Nonfiction |
| When The Moon Hatched | Sarah A Parker | Fantasy Romance |
| I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This* | Chelsea Devantez | Memoir |
| Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies | Heather Fawcett | Fantasy |
| Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture | Kyle Chayka | Nonfiction |
| Wellness | Nathan Hill | Fiction |
| Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands | Heather Fawcett | Fantasy |
| He Who Drowned the World | Shelley Parker-Chan | Fantasy |
| A Tempest of Tea | Hafsah Faizal | Fantasy |
| Lies and Weddings | Kevin Kwan | Fiction |
As far as unfinished books go, I had 7 unfinished books with plans (hopes) to return to 6 of them. The 6 are Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, Viral Justice: How We Grow The World We Want, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, How To Say Babylon, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, and There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.
No plans to go back to The Poisonwood Bible. Sorry, Barbara. And I’ll have to wait for the right moment to return to Babylon because it is really intense and I wasn’t in the right headspace to continue with it at the time. But I do want to finish it.
All in all, a good year for reading a wide variety of books. In 2025- more audiobooks and maybe a book club?
