At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).

As a data point, I started off the year with the following books already in progress:

• Blood of Tyrants
• Lightspeed 112
• Thief of Time
• The Elements of Pizza
• Owls to Athens
• Think Julia
• Teach Your Kids to Code
• Algorithms in a Nutshell

Just like last year I had the goal of gettign to my Kickstarter books once I finished my to-read bookshelf on Goodreads. I’m closer than I’ve been in the past 2 years to being able to do this, but since I’m trying to finish up series I’ve started, this might end up getting pushed back yet another year.

Trends

This year I continued my second time reading through the Discworld books. This is a very slow progression because I just take the books to work and read them while queuing up for the microwave. I was able to go from Thief of Time to Going Postal by the time the year ended.

I finally finished the Temeriere series. I thought Naomi Novik did a great job sticking the landing (not an intentional dragon pun). I was very invested in the relationships established between all the characters and really wanted things to go well for them. At the same time, this has always been a series that was realistically written (other than the existence of dragons) so I knew there would be consequences to the actions the characters had taken. I also thought it was nice for the series to end with a series of short stories that closed off some of the smaller storylines.

I also started a few new series in 2024.

Seanan McGuire series

On the back of my enjoyment of the Wayward Children series, I decided to started reading the October Daye series. A quick reading of the synopsis gave me the impression that it would be The Dresden Files, but a female. In some ways that’s not a bad reference point. But just like calling The Magicians Harry Potter, but in college - it doesn’t quite do justice to the subtleties that make it unique from the series it’s compared to. Similarly to Wayward Children I found the first entry in the series to drag on a bit while McGuire did all the work to set up the book’s “universe”. After that I found each book to be impossible to put down. I would ignore almost everything else in order to finish each book as rapidly as possible. McGuire is so good at both creating a mystery and also getting us to care so much about these characters.

I also read Middlegame, the first book in the Alchemical Journeys series. I really enjoyed the book once I got past its odd narrative structure, but I didn’t really have the urge to continue on with the series afterwards. I think it felt like it stood alone pretty well. Also, from the other books’ synopsis, it seems that they are in the same universe, but unconnected.

The Empyrean Series

Long-time readers of my blog know that this is not my first foray in to romance. It’s not even technically my first romantasy - as my first romance book was a romantasy book - Tiger Eye by Marjorie Liu (even if that category didn’t exist back then). But this was the book that EVERYONE was talking about. I have 0% viewership in Booktok (I don’t even use TikTok) or the YouTube equivalent. But this series was SO in that EVERYONE knew about it. I remember one or two years ago reading about how it was the most checked out book from libraries in the year that it came out. What pushed me over the edge was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct which explored the long history of mixing romance and/or smut with dragon novels. I listened to it as an audiobook and I absolutely loved the narrator chosen. Only about 15 minutes into the book I text my wife, “This is a horny book.” There wasn’t any sex yet, but the older sister of the protagonist is giving her sister tips on having sex at the military academy without having it come back to bite you. That said, I thought that Rebecca Yarros did an amazing job making the story an awesome story (that just happens to have explicit sex in it). In fact, I usually direct readers of my EOY retrospective to just look in my blog or Goodreads page for the reviews (too much work to add in all the links to the list at the end of this post), but I’m going to link to my review of Fourth Wing here. I (along with tons of others) cannot wait for the third book in this planned quintology (I think) to come out in January.

Chilling Effect Series

I first heard about Varlie Valdes’ Chilling Effect series from an interview in Lightspeed Magazine. She mentioned having a Cuban space captain and I thought the idea was fabulous. I’ve mentioned in various places that I never felt out of place in the world. As much as race is a construct, it’s still the way we see ourselves in America over the past 200 years and I’m racially white. I’m ethnically hispanic, but I grew up in South Florida, so I always saw myself in the world and in media. But as a consumer of science fiction, it’s so often a generic society that is either based on the USA or at least is in opposition (in some way) to the current USA culture. We rarely see other cultures represented (which is part of the reason that I love Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya series - which is basically Vietnamese culture in space). This series, with its main character constantly speaking “Spanglish” (that is, code switching mid-sentence) was almost like Miami in space. But that was just enough to pique my interest. What kept me reading this entire trilogy was the fact that Valdes takes everything from nerd culture and puts it into a blender for a story that’s both meta and winking at the audience with its references and also a dramedy that takes its story seriously (it’s not Space Balls, but more like a Quentin Tarrentino movie - if he were into scifi nerd stuff instead of kung fu movies)

Gods of Blood and Powder (aka Powder Mage 2)

This book series takes a small time skip from the prior Powder Mage series. It uses some characters from the original series and introduces us to others. Overall, I liked it better than the first series. The multi-layered levels of political intrigue and spy-vs-spy going on in the series kept me addicted. It also provided a very satisfying ending to characters who were with us for most of the six books of the combined series.

Other Misc Trends and Tidbits

This year a slowed down a little on magazines. That’s partly because I was previously reading the magazines while taking 10 minute walking breaks at work, but both in an attempt to keep from putting too much pressure on my wrists (from the weight of the phone) and listening to audiobooks put a dampener on how many issues I read. This year I read Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway which seems extra prescient as we end 2024 with the murder of the United Healthcare CEO (and the media’s inability to understand the motivations behind the move) and the much more explicit capture of government by the ultra-wealthy as personified by DOGE. The Cosmere ended an era with the publication of Wind and Truth, the fifth book in The Stormlight Archive series. Long time readers will know that I never DNF a book, but Happy Doomsday really tempted me. I hated the narrative voice, plot, and characters, and it never ended up redeeming itself.

Book of the Year

I found it very hard to come up with a book of the year. My reading is always eclectic, but this year seemed to be all over the place. I have always loved reading about science (I had a subscription to Discover magazine for years) and I thought I knew a lot about gender differences and how we have often not paid enough attention to women’s bodies, but Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution blew me away with tons of facts I didn’t know. The Chilling Effect series made me laugh so hard when I truly needed it. Walkaway gives a scary look at a possible future we seem to be careening towards. Middlegame was an incredible use of narrative that makes use of some of what Wind and Truth does with the chapter epigraphs, but takes it to a whole level higher; and the relationship made me cry so hard. Fourth Wing redefined what I thought was possible in a romance novel. Shogun was a masterpiece that deserved the new TV adaptation of the last year. Finally, the October Daye series consumed my every waking hour when I was reading it.

I decided to disqualify October Daye since I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the series. I almost included Fourth Wing, but decided to treat it like the October Day series and wait for the ending of the series. In the end, it came down to Middlegame, Shogun, and the Chilling Effect series.

Shogun ended well, but the first half of the book just dragged on too much. Similarly, the eponymous first book of Chilling Effect just dragged on a tiny bit too much for me. For all the emotions it brought up in me and for the great narrative structure, Middlegame is my favorite book of 2024.

Goodreads Stats

• Total pages read: 18,792
• shortest book: Nighmare Magazine 137 (83 pages)
• longest book: Wind and Truth (1330 pages)
• Average book length: 391 pages
• Most shelved: Fouth Wing (Also shelved by 3,909,852 others on Goodreads)
• Least Shelved: Nightmare Magazine 137 (11 others)
• My Average rating: 3.8 stars
• Highest Rated on Goodreads: Wind and Truth (4.5 stars)

Books Read in 2024

1. Blood of Tyrants
2. Lightspeed Magazine 112
3. Thief of Time
4. Mislaid in Parts Half-Known
5. League of Dragons
6. Golden Age and Other Stories
7. Night Watch
8. Starter Villain
9. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 1. Million Years of Human Evolution
10. Lightspeed Magazine 113
11. Nightmare Magazine 137
12. Butts: A Backstory
13. Monstrous Regiment
14. Happy Doomsday
15. Religion: Ruining Everything Since 4004BC
16. Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking
17. Chilling Effect
18. Walkaway
19. What if Hemingway Wrote Javascript?
20. Save Yourself, Mammal!
21. The Black Tides of Heaven
22. Prime Deceptions
23. Middlegame
24. Fugitive Telemetry
25. Sins of Empire
26. Wrath of Empire
27. Lightspeed Magazine 114
28. Fault Tolerance
29. Rick and Morty Vs Dungeons and Dragons: Deluxe Edition
30. Fourth Wing
31. Iron Flame
32. Blood of Empire
33. System Collapse
34. Rosemary and Rue
35. Provenance
36. Milk Street: The new Rules
37. Shogun Volume 1
38. A Local Habitation
39. The Pizza Bible
40. Lightspeed Magazine Issue 115
41. Seize the Stars
42. An Artificial Night
43. Late Eclipses
44. Going Postal
45. Shogun Volume 2
46. One Salt Sea
47. Wind and Truth

• Goodreads
• End-of-Year