2024 Reading Challenge… Results

It took a bit of intense audio-listening, and a couple of super short easy-reads but I finished 52 books in 2024!

I wasn’t confident that I was going to make it to be honest, but a decent push over the last couple of weeks got me over the finish line.

Here’s my wrap up for December:

I was largely saved by the random stack of ‘novelty’ books on my TBR shelf and that showed up at Christmas.

My physical reads in December were:

Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops (Books 1 & 2) were my first reads, and they may have been short, but they were definitely sweet. I laughed frequently, face-palmed more than once, and not-so-quietly despaired at humanity every now and then throughout.

Then I finished The Little Book Of Hygge which was a cozy read perfect for reading by the light of the Christmas lights and a scented candle.

The Usborne graphic novel version of The Wizard Of Oz by Russel Punter was next up, and, well, sadly this one took the title for least favourite book of the month. Usually the flying monkeys are the low-light of this story for me (I really hate monkeys) however in this version, they were probably my favourite bit. I just did not get on with the art style of this version, particularly the animal characters (such as the Lion) – I found them really quite creepy and it distracted me from the rest of the story. The monkeys were, weirdly, the least creepy of all the animals in the book. Oh, and the wolves, they were mostly okay, too.

The final physical book I finished was We Rate Dogs which Tori got for Christmas. 12/10, All the goodest doggos.

The rest of my finished titles were Audiobooks.

I finished Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution which was quite simply brilliant. Very word-nerdy, and an alternate history I could really get into. I loved the language play throughout the book, and the steady slow-burning build of tension throughout it. During the last hour of the book, I think I was bawling for about 45 minutes of it because it was heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, hopeless, hopeful, and beautiful. Yet another book to add to the list of ones I recommend with: It will break you, you should read it!

I then started and got obsessed with a brand new (to me) series by Jodi Taylor. Worlds away from the Nothing Girl series by her that I have read previously, Just One Damned Thing After Another is a delightful book that starts a series exploring history in a wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey kind of way.

After that, I listened to two of the short stories in the series: The Very First Damned Thing and When A Child Is Born.

You can probably guess that one of those is a prequel of the series and one is a Christmas special – I’ll let you work out which was which.

*

I am also reading Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by Stephen Fry… both in Audio and physically. I have listened to about a third so far, and read another third in the actual book. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first book I finished in 2025 at the rate I’m going so far. I then have Troy to listen to, and then I have a beautiful signed hardback copy of Odyssey to read to finish the series off. But let’s not get all ahead of ourselves and predict I might manage such a thing in a single year rather than getting distracted…

The other books I am working my way through are 365 Days Wild (I’m almost done with this one now!) and I started To Save Every One: 200 Years of RNLI Courage as well.

So maybe they will be my first three books marked off on my running total for 2025 – where I will be once again aiming for 52 books read. And maybe also aiming for managing it with less of a mad panic in the last three weeks of the year… but probably not.