2024: The Year In Books

As 2024 comes to a close, my fourth full year of remote working, I managed to once again surpass my previous records by completing a whopping 61 books, two books more than my previous high set last year and my fourth consecutive year completing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.  I completed the challenge in mid-November and surpassed last year’s total in mid-December.  I read 22,622 pages, by far my highest total of all time and just the second time I’ve managed to surpass 20.000 pages.

Of those books, only five were non-fiction and, of the remaining 56 novels, only five were tied to a TV show, either as the source material or as a tie-in.  None of the books came out of my dwindling “to-read” drawer, with two hard covers, two paperbacks, 53 e-books and no audiobooks.  I continued to take advantage of my library card, which helped me procure 46 of the books I consumed throughout the year.

Over 69% of the books I read this year were by authors I had read before. The 19 authors that I read for the first this year were:

Jessica Knoll Isabella Maldonado Kathleen McGurl Lisa Taddeo
Lisa Jewell Millie Bobby Brown J.M. Dillard Lee Goldberg
Avery Cunningham Margot Douaihy R.F. Kuang Jessica Simpson
Jeffrey Lang Dayton Ward Holly Wilson Karin Smirnoff
Walter Beede Michael Connelly Rob Harvilla

Karin Slaughter, Jeffery Deaver, Laura Lippman, Elin Hilderbrand, Jessica Knoll, Michael Connelly, Minka Kent, Lee Goldberg, Rebecca Forster, Stephen King, and Sarah Pekkanen were the authors that I read multiple titles from during 2024.

17 of the books I read were released this year, while only three of them were released last century, with the oldest first published in 1997.

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Book 5 (of 52) – Yellowface

Yellowface – R.F. Kuang

A struggling white author sees an opportunity when her friend, a successful Chinese author, dies unexpectedly after a night of drinking, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript.  After reworking and filling in the missing gaps in the manuscript, the white author has a best seller on her hands, but when questions pop up online, she worries that she is found out.  When she publishes a second work, solely of her own imagination save a single paragraph that served as inspiration, she is found out, as her dead friend workshopped the paragraph at a workshop years prior.  After the dust settles, everyone seems to have moved on, but the ghosts of the past never do stay dead, do they?

R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, the winner of the 2003 Goodreads Choice award for Best Fiction, was an interesting look at the publishing industry and the effects social media can have on writers used to existing in solitude.  I was enjoying it most of the way, but the ending fell flat for me.  Outside of this, I don’t know much about Kuang or her other work, so I don’t know if we will be seeing her back here again sometime.