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| title | description | publishedDate | updatedDate | tags | ||
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| Books I Read in 2024 | I'm reading again! | 2025-01-01 |
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I READ A BOOK THIS YEAR!
In fact, I READ MANY BOOKS THIS YEAR!!!
Let me explain the excitement. Like oh-so-many people, I used to read quite a lot as a child and early teen - things like Alex Rider, CHERUB, Artemis Fowl, and so much more. I was a big fan of a good book, but I fell out of the habit at some point during secondary school. I never stopped liking books and reading, and though I have bought myself books over the years, it was rare that I'd finish one.
Come April 2024, I was reading some article in WIRED and noticed it was written by Andy Greenberg. I'd read his book Sandworm in the past, and it was one of those rare exceptions that I did actually finish. Out of idle curiosity, I checked to see if he had any other books, saw he did (called Tracers in the Dark), ordered it, and devoured it.
When I think back to reading as a kid, I remember that the things I'd read were the things I absolutely couldn't put down. If I wasn't enjoying something, I didn't get hung up on it and I moved on. When I thought back to the odd few books I did finish between when I fell out of the habit and now, they were also ones I couldn't put down.
It's almost as if... if I'm reading a book that I'm enjoying... I'll want to read it more?
🤯
When I was done with Tracers in the Dark and wanted to keep reading, I headed down to Waterstones with my new realisation in mind. I made a carefully considered and discerning book choice, and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a little bit of a celebration of that, here's a bit about each of books I read this year, listed in chronological order. There may be spoilers ahead.
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg
See on The StoryGraph
Non-fiction (crime), 384 pages, published 2022
My rating: 5.0 ⭐
Tracers in the Dark is about cryptocurrency, its use in cybercrime and the law-enforcement strategies that are developing to combat it. It's an exceptionally well-crafted book that reads like a piece of fiction, with a strong "storyline" and rich detail. This is a non-fiction book that (for real, in this case) "reads like a thriller". It's fascinating, eye-opening and has enough detail in it to satisfy the nerdy bit of me that's into computer science while still being readable and accessible. I'd reccomend it to anyone with even a passing interest.
If you've somehow ended up on my website, you're probably somewhat into tech. Therefore: this is a good book! You should read it!!
The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley
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Fiction (contemporary), published 2020
My rating: 4.0 ⭐
The Cat and the City is an interesting book. It centres around this one cat roaming around Tokyo, and the lives it touches in doing so. You start the book thinking all the characters are completely disparate sets of people, just all living at the same time, but as the book goes on you begin to work out that actually, everyone is unknowingly involved in everyone else's things.
Overall, it's a little like the idea of 6 degrees of separation but in book form and structured almost like a set of short stories. It's well thought-out and well-presented, with lots of rich and realistic characters.
Generally pleasant book. I was gifted another book by Nick Bradley that follows one of the characters from this book in more detail, and I'm looking forwards to reading that.
How They Broke Britain by James O'Brien
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Non-fiction (politics), published 2023
My rating: 5.0 ⭐
For the past decade and a half, the political side of the UK has been an utter clusterfuck of mismanagement and disaster that's pile-driven the country and its public services into the ground. This book explores why in painful detail, and does it very well.
I'm of the age where a lot of the things described in this book happened before I could think properly, which made its impact even bigger - it has a lot of context to add to recent politics that I was too young and disengaged to notice when I was living through it. Plus, it's written by the incredibly sharp and witty broadcaster James O'Brien, who writes as he speaks - which is a big plus.
How They Broke Britain is an excellent and deeply depressing book. Big recommendation, especially if you're late-teens/early-twenties (and British). This was the right thing to read in the month before our general election.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)
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Fiction (literary, dystopia), published 1994
My rating: 4.5 ⭐
Do you like your memories? Would you like to forcibly lose them?
The Memory Police explores a world where there is a secret service-like agency that has the power to make people lose their memories of things. They vanish something, all the townsfolk destroy any of these things that they have, they collectively forget, and life continues. You might well be able to predict the twist.
The writing and translation here is very well done - it has a unique but not unpleasant writing style to it that I really enjoyed, and it did well to impart emotions of fear and frustration and tenseness on me throughout. Near misses felt threatening, intimate moments felt close and happy moments felt real. All of this is despite two of the three characters having no names.
Despite it ending on a low (an optimistic and bittersweet low, but a low nonetheless), this was another really good read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
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Fiction (lgbtq+), published 2013
My rating: 5.0 ⭐
I'm not sure where to even start here. Nevada is outstanding. And it's got a nice cover?
It centres around one trans woman, who's stuck in life, listless and honestly a bit confused. It's so real and accurate to the trans experience, and a little eye-opening - I described it to a friend as one of those books that stops you in your tracks and makes you stare at wall for a bit to process what you just read. It reframed a lot of things in my life and had a big impact on me.
The ending was not my favourite in the world, but honestly? That was massively overshadowed by how good the rest of the book was. This is one of few pieces of media I've come across with trans characters that aren't in some way god-awfully written and that I don't hate. There's no wonder people hail Nevada as one of the trailblazers of really good trans literature.
My copy (as I I believe most do at this point?) had an afterword from Binnie, which was a really nice thing to read as a little bit of closure and insight into the deeper layers of the book.
READ THIS BOOK. It's great. Multiple friends of mine agree. From one of their reviews:
As I later said to Abi, sometimes a book is good in a way that it makes you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.
there are more things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
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Fiction (literary), published 2022
My rating: 3.75 ⭐
there are more things caused some conflict within me. On the one hand - it's excellently well written, using incredibly rich detail and emotion in tandem with some genius use of the spacing and layout of the text on the page to create atmosphere and feeling and tension. Not only that, it's very well structured - you with what feels like a loose collection of mostly unrelated stories, but as time goes on, it ends up crafting a tighter and tighter web of relations between those characters, creating a timeline of people that eventually lead to the characters of the present day.
On the other hand... I didn't enjoy it all that much? That's absolutely not by any fault of the book's; I don't think it's a style of writing that I get on with. There are a lot timeline shifts, it's quite slow to get anywhere and there's no big event that happens/quest to go on/mission/etc., all while simultaneously not really feeling like there's anything going on with the "main" characters, because you don't spend a great deal of time with them.
So... good book. I won't re-read it (it was a challenge to get through the first time round), but I will remember it and I think it did utterly excellent things. Lots of conversations were had with a friend about this book. You might really love it.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot)
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Fiction (magical realism), published 2015
My rating: 4.0 ⭐
The second lot of weird Japanese fiction that I read in 2024!
Do you like coffee? Do you like time travel? Do you like rules? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I might have the café for you. The fictional café, anyway.
This book made me shed a couple of tears, which is huuuuuuuuge. Only like, three, but as someone who does not and cannot cry... wow! Before the Coffee Gets Cold is deeply emotive. I won't re-hash the plot of the book; what I will say is that it left me with a refreshed perspective on the importance of the people around you. It's a strong theme of the book, and the story was incredible.
The writing style, however, be it an artefact of translation or otherwise, was a little plain. I really like the premise, I like the stories of each character and I like the book as a whole, but for me, the biggest let-down was that the narration felt quite detached and dry. It didn't lack in detail - I was left with a very detailed and rich idea of what the cafe was like (you don't leave it during the entire book), and I understood what the characters were going through - but there was a little something missing that I can't quite put my finger on.
All in all, Before the Coffee Gets Cold was a solid, interesting, thought-provoking short read. I might pick up some of the rest of the series; time will tell.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
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Fiction (contemporary sci-fi), published 2018
My rating: 5.0 ⭐
Easy, fun, engaging, delightful reading. I read this cover-to-cover in three days (potentially thanks to 11 hours of solo travelling), and could not put it down during that time. Apart from the day I took about 4 hours of trains and forgot to bring it with me. I could not read it then.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is about aliens (sort of?) dropping into earth from somewhere or other and causing chaos. This book is not about the aliens as much as the chaos and the implications they have on the world at large, and the people at the epicentre of that.
The whole book is written from the point of view of the main character, April May. The narration was really super effective at keeping me stuck-in - my need to keep reading gradually built throughout the book without me noticing until riiiiiiight at the end, when it came to a crescendo and dropped me into a particularly prickly cliff-hanger. The end in particular created real fear and foreboding within me - I very much had the the feeling that something was about to jump from the pages and slap me in the face with every page I turned. The twist was sufficiently twisty.
There was also a pleasant amount of social commentary going on, about the way people on a global scale interacted with the change and the drama going on, and what massive fame can do to people - thoughtful and considered in a way that you might expect from a book written by Hank Green, someone who I'm familiar with from his channel on YouTube and other assorted public works. I was absolutely delighted to see some of his particular wit, charm and thoughtfullness coming through in the writing, especially considering this was his first book ever.
After finishing AART, I rushed out to get the next book in the two-part-series as soon as I could - that book being...
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour by Hank Green
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Fiction (contemporary sci-fi), published 2020
My rating: 4.5 ⭐
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour was pretty much just as good as the first book in the series. The plot here did a nice job of developing on the first book - it answered a lot of subtle questions about what the hell was going on (by design, you would hope), and it did a great job of turning my intrigue into the mechanics of the first book into absolute horror. I mean - it doesn't dance around it - in this book, the main characters are trying to prevent the end of the human race.
Each chapter in the book is narrated by one of the 4 main characters, which is used to microdose you with cliffhangers. There were multiple moments where the book had me going "wh-at???" before immediately dropping me into a different scene, and I don't think there was a dull moment in the entire book because of it. It made me laugh out loud ("OH!" April said. "Yeah, and I can Google stuff with my mind!"*), internally scream at people (ANDY STOP SABOTAGING YOU AND BEX) and, just like the first, really sucked me in.
The only reason that this wasn't a 5 star for me was because, sprinkled throughout the book, there were some slightly jarring and clunky sections of dialogue. Instances of things like "April began answering my questions. <insert dialogue that absolutely does not do that>" cropped up a few times, to the extent that it made me think I was missing pages and I had to re-read that section to keep me from thinking I was going insane.
Otherwise - really excellent book and series, and I'd definitely recommend them.
Books I Didn't Finish
Part of the reason I kept up with reading this year was precisely because I didn't linger for too long on books that had nothing keeping me engaged. If I wanted to drop a book, I made sure I got to at least 80 pages in it to give it a chance, and only then gave up on it.
There were two books I dropped this year - The Regional Office is Under Attack by Manuel Gonzales and A Room Called Earth by Madeline Ryan.
I got about halfway through The Regional Office is Under Attack, didn't read it for a week or two and then after that I didn't want to pick it up again. It was okay at best. It felt very surface level, mostly owing to the characters not being great, even though the plot was fine. There was just nothing compelling me to keep reading.
I'm a little sadder about A Room Called Earth. It's fiction, billed as a book about neurodiversity and interactions with people - and on the face of it, as someone who isn't quite standard-issue myself, this sounded great! But I struggled to even get to my 80-page threshold - it was boring and I did not like the main character at all. That's a particular issue when the book is narrated from the perspective of the main character.
But anyway... here's to 2025!
I read 9 books in 2024, all between April and December, with a combined total of 3,164 pages. Of those I finished, I gave an average rating of 4.53 which seems... a little high?
Either way, if you're curious, you can find some fun little graphs and whatnot from my reading this year on my StoryGraph 2024 Reading Wrap-Up.
Here's to at least 9 more books in 2025 :D