The Year in Reading

When I decided at the end of last winter to return to school and major in English, I knew that I would be reading more than usual and that I needed to start stretching my brain before classes began. Having fallen out of the habit of reading many years prior, at the end of February I decided to start reading regularly again and set a goal to read 100 books by the end of the year. I also wanted to begin working my way through the classics.

I read 84 books in 2024¹ and I’m pretty pleased with that number despite not reaching my goal. Had I given it more thought, I might’ve set my goal to 75 since I didn’t account for January and February already having passed when I started the challenge. Either number, though, was ambitious given that I read exactly zero books the year prior and, for many before that, the number of books I read per year was generally less than 5.

It feels good to be reading again and it’s weird that I ever stopped; I enjoyed reading in my younger days. That’s how it goes, though: you get distracted or focused on some part of life and some other part falls off. A person can only do so much. Before I moved to Costa Rica in 2013, I thought I would spend my days in some thatched-roof hut reading and writing. During the two years I lived there, though, my focus was elsewhere and I wrote little and read less. It didn’t pick up much after that. So I’m happy now that my life is back on track, at least in terms of reading.

While the vast majority of what I read this year fell mostly within something approaching the historical literary canon—or novels adjacent to it—I wasn’t tied to it, reading everything from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah to Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and many points in between. In addition to some of the classics, I read a few modern works of fiction, a handful of nonfiction books, some poetry books, a few dramas, four children’s books (two of which I had never read before), two or three books I had previously read, and a YA novel that popped up on my radar this fall. There were four or five books I read more than once this year and numerous short stories within collections that I read repeatedly.

Now that I’ve started reading again, I’m more excited than embarrassed by how little I’ve read over the years because there are so many books waiting for me! I do have concerns about my timeline, though. Assuming I read 100 books a year, if I’m lucky, I’ll only get to read a few thousand more before I’m below ground. But I likely won’t read 100 a year going forward because I’m not a particularly fast reader and, more importantly, there are so many other aspects of life I want to also focus on like music, writing, photography, school, and so on. There simply is not enough time. And this is all assuming that I remain single with no time commitments to someone else. And honestly, being single is not how I want to spend my days. I’ve never wanted to be single. But, here I am.

I think, then, that 75 seems like a reasonable number of books to read in a year. 75 print books. I don’t know if I’ll ever listen to audiobooks. I know people swear by them but they just aren’t appealing to me.

At any given moment now, roughly 20-25 books sit on shelves and various flat surfaces around my apartment, waiting to be read. On digital shelves, hundreds more sit waiting to be purchased. It makes me happy knowing—at least to some extent—what I have to look forward to in the months and years to come. And I’m thrilled to have found new works and new authors that have moved me in ways I forgot were possible; I’m grateful for their influence.

Takeaways From 2024

I’ve yet to find an author who can touch Nabokov stylistically. I’ll keep searching but I’m fine with re-reading Nabokov. Over and over. And over.
Anthony Doerr’s writing is beautiful. All the Light We Cannot See is a gorgeous tale, rich in imagery.
Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds gave me a lot of hope in terms of what type of writing is reaching young kids today; the book does an excellent job of drawing attention to the school-to-prison pipeline that exists within the black community.
Two authors I’m upset with: Oscar Wilde and J.D. Salinger. Having only read them for the first time this year—and instantly falling in love with both—I can’t believe they left this world having published so little. Not cool, guys.
Had you, at any point in my life, told me that one of the most moving stories I would ever read would be about two Catholic bishops in the American Southwest set in the mid-1800s, I would’ve assumed you were joking because nothing in that description is even slightly interesting to me. And yet. . . I bawled like a baby reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and am getting choked up just thinking about it now.

What I Read

Below is a list of most of the books I read in 2024, alphabetized by author/editor last name, excluding textbooks for school. My favorites (that weren’t re-reads) are highlighted. If you have reading suggestions or just want to talk books, by all means, message me. Have fun reading in 2025!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
The Fall by Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Ron Carlson Writes a Story: Tips from a Master of the Craft by Ron Carlson
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto
Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice by Sonja K. Foss
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Cambridge Companion to Narrative by David Herman
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories: Or, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd Edition by Zoltan Kovecses
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff
Method and Madness: The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party by Chessy Normile
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Tom Patterson Years by Tom Patterson
The Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Humorous Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction by Lex Williford
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf