My 2024 Reading Recap: Best Books, Familiar Favorites, and New, Lesser Known Authors

In 2024, I set a modest goal on Goodreads of reading 80 books. I know reading takes up a considerable amount of my leisure time, and I was interested in trying a new volunteering opportunity. Alas, a merger happened at work and I didn’t have the bandwidth to do that. All of which is to say, I ended up reading 113 books this year instead of dipping into volunteering. Reading those books, though, translates to 43,588 pages read, or about 119 pages a day, which isn’t taking into account the audiobook listens, which range anywhere from eight hour listens to 18 hour listens. I absolutely did not read every day. I’m more of a, go a few days without reading and then binge a book throughout a single day kind of person. My longest book was Jack Carr’s Only the Dead at 704 pages, and the shortest was Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter at 180 pages. The average book length was 385, which is a great book length! Despite the modest goal, I still beat last year’s 110 books read and 41,166 pages read; go figure.

Of the 113 books, 14 were audiobooks via Libby (a great asset if you have a library card!): One Billion Americans, The End of Everything, Arbitrary Lines, The Aftermath, American Whitelash, Looking for the Good War, Factfulness, The Court At War, The Invisible Gorilla, Homegrown, Democracy Awakening, The Body, Want, and A Short History of Nearly Everything.

So hard to pick my favorite listen of the year, but if I had to pick, I was most enthralled by The Court at War as a politics and law junkie. You can read my review of it here.

My overall favorite nonfiction book, however, was Evan Friss’ The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. You can read my review here. Shout-out to close second, David Itzkoff’s Robin, and Dan Carlin’s The End Is Always Near as well.

Everything else I read, or 96 books, was fiction. I returned to familiar favorite authors, including Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, Harlan Coben, Iris Johansen, Jeffery Deaver, Brad Thor, Grady Hendrix, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, as well as recent authors I’ve only just gotten into in the past two years, James Patterson and Agatha Christie. I also continued with BookTok favorites, Colleen Hoover, Frieda McFaden, and Jeneva Rose, including going to the latter’s book signing! I’m singling out Karin Slaughter as a “familiar favorite author” because I read more of her books than any other author in 2024:

1. Pieces of Her (standalone)
2. Beyond Reach (the last of the Grant County series I needed to finish)
3. Triptych (Will Trent series)
4. Fractured (Will Trent series)
5. Undone (Will Trent series)
6. Broken (Will Trent series)
7. Fallen (Will Trent series)

She’s so damn good. Nobody writes crime fiction like she does in contemporary America, as far as I’m concerned. The closest is my boy Deaver. Slaughter will go down to the bone marrow and make a nest for four hundred pages. And you like it, dammit!

Authors you may recognize who I finally had a chance to read this year included: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts; Emily Henry’s Funny Story and Book Lovers (honestly, ask me on a different day and Funny Story is my favorite read of 2024); Jason Rekulak’s Hidden Pictures; Riley Sager’s The Only One Left and Home Before Dark; Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Lying Game; Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six; Simone St. James’ The Broken Girls; Crystal Smith Paul’s Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?; V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; and Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory (those last three all could have made my top five reads of the year), among others, including my first time reading a Michael Connelly book (Nine Dragons).

Perhaps the most hyped book for the past year and a half that I finally read in 2024 — in fact, it was my last read of 2024 — was Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, which I raved about here. On the flip side, lesser known authors and books I read this year I would highly recommend included: Robyn Harding’s The Drowning Woman (I also enjoyed The Perfect Family), Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, Ivy Pochoda’s Sing Her Down, Lindsay Ellis’ Axiom End, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, Charlie Huston’s Catchpenny, and Camilla Sten’s impressive debut, The Lost Village.

I also read my first full-on smut, dark romance book, courtesy of my sister-in-law, Penelope Douglas’ Credence, while also enjoying classics I’d never read before, such as Eileen, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Wuthering Heights. All of the classics were quite lovely and well-worth “circling back” to.

Finally, I’m excited that I made it back to the world of graphic novels, if briefly, with Jeph Loeb’s Fallen Son about Captain America. I hope to read more graphic novels in 2025.

This is impossible, but if you made me pick a top five reads of the year, they would be:

1. Kristin Hannah’s The Women
2. Nikki Erlick’s The Measure
3. Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
4. Keith Rosson’s Fever House and its sequel, The Devil by Name
5. Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter

Just outside of that would be King’s short story collection, You Like It Darker.

You can, of course, find my reviews for all the books I mention here (and didn’t mention linked to my Goodreads account!) on the blog. Have fun scrolling through, if you’re so inclined.

I don’t have too many reading goals for 2025. Other than the aforementioned arbitrary goal of 80 books to read, I’d like to continue reading a few classics, new and lesser known authors, familiar favorites, graphic novels, and I’m always hoping to add more nonfiction to my reading.

What did your reading look like in 2024? What do you hope to achieve with your reading in 2025?