2024 reading review

It's the year 2525! (Well…2025, but you can't begrudge me a little bit of enthusiasm.) Time to review my year with books (this is not a book blog, I keep reminding myself).

As usual, my annual goal is to read 50 books of any kind. Last year, my final count was in the 70s. This year, it was…120. (My "official" count at Goodreads is 105, but several of those are actually omnibus volumes.) The average page count per book is still around 300, too. I wonder where I found the extra freet time. Maybe I didn't fall asleep as often.

The first book of the year was Emily's Quest by L. M. Montgomery, the final book in her Emily trilogy. Maybe it's juvenile, maybe it's girly, and maybe I started reading Montgomery in my teens to impress a girl. Nonetheless, over the years, Montgomery has become my favourite Canadian author.

The last novel of the year was Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh, which I finished on the weekend before Christmas. This is an SF novel from 1988 (which won the Hugo in 1989) about the implications of mass human cloning and designing human beings for specific functions. (A little bit like Blade Runner in that respect, I guess.) It's long, and I found it slow starting, but I got into it after a while. A good comeback, considering I didn't really enjoy reading Downbelow Station last year.

My newest book was In Too Deep by Lee and Andrew Child. As I said last year, as long as the Jack Reacher books keep coming out in October, and I keep reading them as soon as possible, this is going to be a recurring theme every year.

The oldest was Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, one of the great Chinese novels. I also finished reading the plays of Aphra Behn, the Restoration dramatist. But Journey to the West was published c. 1592, beating her by almost a century. This was another book that was hard to get into, and (though I'm not quite finished) might also be the longest book I've ever read.

When you've read double your intended goal for the year, it's twice as hard to pick a favourite. I suppose mine for 2023 was Holly by Stephen King, his most recent novel, featuring his neurotic lady detective from the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, etc.). My runner-up, collectively, was the Toradora! series of light novels by Yuyuko Takemiya. I saw the anime last year, and was so affected by it, I watched it again. The novels didn't disappoint, either—surprising since I'm hardly a romance reader.

It's a little easier to pick a least favourite when you devote an entire month to reading something other than genre fiction, which inevitably leads to some rather bleak and depressing literature. This year's "winner" was The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, a fictionalized telling of the story of a Bosnian cellist who risked his life to play an adagio every day for each of the victims of a bombing. The problem with the book is that it wasn't really about the cellist. He was a backdrop to his own story, and it kind of left me cold. The runner-up was its immediate predecessor on my list, Rabbit, Run by John Updike. (Is there a proper literary word for a novel's main character who is just unpleasant in every possible way? "Anti-protagonist"?)

My best new discovery of the year was, A Confederacy of Dunces, the Pulitzer-winning novel by John Kennedy Toole. Again, this was one of my selections for September. Its (anti?) protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an overweight, unemployed, pretentious pseudo-intellectual who lives with his mother. If Toole had written this novel in the 2020s instead of the 1960s, he'd probably be a terminally-online Redditor.

I met my goal of reading five nonfiction books this year, though no more. The topics were literary criticism, theology, and poetry. The last, in particular (Anglican poet Malcolm Guite's two books Waiting on the Word and The Word in the Wilderness) have sort of sparked my interest in poetry, and I plan to read more this year. (I didn't like poetry when I was in university, leading one of my English profs to remark once—tongue-in-cheek, hopefully—what I didn't deserve an English degree. Better late than never.)

There were two goals that I didn't meet: First, finishing the works of Stephen King. I have one book left, You Like It Darker, which I am about 2/3 of the way through. Second, completing Journey to the West. I read three of the four volumes of Anthony Yu's translation, but just ran out of time. Since my Christmas vacation is usually a good time to blitz through a few books, I would have accomplished both. How was I to know that a medical problem would keep me in the emergency room for so much of my free time? I'll finish with Stephen King soon, though, and then clear the Monkey King off my list a little later, after I've gone through my outstanding library books (why do long-time reserves always come in at once?).

Finally, my reading goals for 2024 include:

• doing a new readthrough. I really enjoyed the experience of blogging my way through Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, and I plan to do a few books regularly. My plan is to start with the final two books in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (having already read and reviewed the first, albeit 20 years ago) and if time permits, a nonfiction book to be determined
• with my Stephen King reading project coming to an end, moving on to another author: specifically, Patrick O'Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturing series of historical fiction
• continuing my habit of reading drama on Saturdays over breakfast, but instead of focusing on a particular author (i.e. Shakespeare and Behn), choose instead from a wide variety of classic plays from the Renaissance to the modern era
• finish up some of the series I've started, but left hanging

Happy 2025, everyone.