Year-End Book Wrapup 2024

Once again, my goal this year was to read 75 books and complete the Read Harder Challenge.  I read 83 books and completed the RHC. I was also a Tournament of Books completist this year.  You can check out everything I read for RHC in last year’s wrapup.  Here's the 2025 RHC and ToB lineup for any curious cats!


Top 5 books of the year:

1. Annie Bot

I keep mentioning how much I loved this; I loved this! A dissection of the patriarchy from the point of view of a near-future, sentient sex-robot named Annie. Unpredictable and impactful. This is one I might actually buy so I can read it again.  

2. James

Percival Everett, man, what can I say? Not even my favorite of his (so far, that’s The Trees) but still, as great as everyone says it is. A loose retelling of Huck Finn from the point of view of the slave, Jim. Loved all the divergences and… everything else about this. You could find 100 eloquent thinkpieces about this novel so I won’t even try.

3.  The Guest

Lest you accuse me of recency bias, this is actually the first book I read this year! I still remember the mood it created and I loved rooting for this grifting, lost anti-heroine. I finished this absolutely wanting more - more of this character, and more Emma Cline.

4. Just Another Epic Love Poem

Top young adult novel of the year; beautifully written, sapphic, and incorporating poetry that is supposed to be good and is actually good. (That’s trickier to pull off than it looks. Pale Fire does it exquisitely, with a poem that’s somehow both plausibly good and hilariously terrible. Possession doesn’t nail it.)  I loved the real-life poetry and the characters’ poetry in this one.  Recommended!

5. Chain-Gang All-Stars

This is the book that I thought should have won last year’s Tournament of Books. I love near-future speculative fiction (see #1, Annie Bot) so this one, about prisoners being forced to fight to the death, was right up my alley - an indictment of the prison-industrial complex via reality television.  

Honorable mentions: Brazen, Books Make Great Friends, Malice, Finally Fitz, Leslie F**ing Jones (on audio), Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, Factfulness




Bottom three books:

1. Brainwyrms

I only finished this to be a ToB completist. I don’t like body horror. It was gross. Gross. Gross. I still regret reading it.

2.  The Greek Coffin Mystery

Read this out of loyalty to a friend, but its… very dated. 



3. One by One

Read this murder mystery anticipating a “twist” that never came. 
 


2025 plans:

I have three goals for 2025 - 1) read 75 books, 2) complete the Read Harder Challenge (tag 2025 rhc), and 3) read or part ways with 10 physical books.

Basically, I so rarely read things on paper that I have a backlog of physical books, often things I really want to read!  If they’ve been sitting around for years I’m also going to give myself permission to pass them along.  The goal is to just reduce the size of my physical TBR pile.  By 10.

As far as the RHC goes, here’s the categories. I smiled when I saw the very last one - since I’ve been working on the 2015 challenge for the past couple of years, I actually only have four categories left.

• A book by an author from Africa
• A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture (Native Americans, Aboriginals, etc.)
• An audiobook
• A collection of poetry

I may end up doing “A collection of poetry” since I have one that is in hard copy and would also count for reducing the TBR pile.

Easiest categories here: childhood favorite book, book about media I love, BIPOC litfic, queernorm.  I'm sure the ToB stuff I still need to read will cover a couple of these categories. Hardest one for me will probably be standalone fantasy since I’m not a fantasy reader. Hoping Chuck Tingle counts as “weird” horror.  I really like the categories this year! Let me know if you have any recommendations, and happy new year.

The full list of categories:
Total: 1/24

[  ] Read a 2025 release by a BIPOC author.
[  ] Reread a childhood favorite book.
[  ] Read a queer mystery.
[  ] Read a book about obsession.
[  ] Read a book about immigration or refugees.
[  ] Read a standalone fantasy book.
[X] Read a book about a piece of media you love (a TV show, a movie, a band, etc): Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born
[  ] Read literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author.
[  ] Read a book based solely on its setting.
[  ] Read a romance book that doesn’t have an illustrated cover.
[  ] Read a work of weird horror.
[  ] Read a staff pick from an indie bookstore. (Preferably, from your local indie bookstore.)
[  ] Read a nonfiction book about nature or the environment.
[  ] Read a comic in translation.
[  ] Read a banned book and complete a task on Book Riot’s How to Fight Book Bans guides.
[  ] Read a genre-blending book.
[  ] Read a book about little-known history.
[  ] Read a “cozy” book by a BIPOC author.
[  ] Read a queernorm book.
[  ] Read the first book in a completed young adult or middle grade duology.
[  ] Read a book about a moral panic.
[  ] Read a holiday romance that isn’t Christmas.
[  ] Read a wordless comic.
[  ] Pick a 2015 Read Harder Challenge task to complete

Anaheim Reads

Spent last week traveling for work again and finished three books, so here's a summary!

Make My Wish Come True (by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick) 

I waited until December to read this, a sapphic romcom in two alternating points of view by the authors of She Gets the Girl, which I really enjoyed. Like this one, more new adult than young adult vibe.  This is a classic Hallmark movie vibe - city girl who has made it big in Los Angeles comes back to the small town and has a fake relationship with the girl she left behind. Charming characters, delightful writing, excellent chemistry - very cute.

Liars (by by Sarah Manguso) 

A Tournament of Books entry abut an extremely toxic marriage. I had to read this in what I called "rage-snippets" because it's about a man who is such a classic tool of the patriarchy (and the woman who stays with him) that I found it enraging to read.  I gather it's somewhat autobiographical, which is why this man has no redeeming qualities, but watching a woman throw away years and have a baby with a man who is awful in every way doesn't make for a fun read.  Anyway, I snippeted my way towards the end. The patriarchy is garbage.

The Last Love Song (by Kalie Holford) 

Another young adult (see, I needed a palate cleanser after my rage-snippets) and it requires a whole lot of suspension of disbelief.  The main character is from a small town, her mother was a famous country star who died young, and she gets sent on a scavenger hunt around the town (by her deceased mom) at her graduation day.  Why wouldn't her grandparents ever even mention how her mother died? (It's not even some dramatic reason.) If her mom's so famous, why wouldn't she just check Wikipedia? The town is dedicated to her mom yet nobody who knew her as a person has ever had a single conversation with her only child? And the fight that gets in the way of the romance at 80% just makes the love interest look like an asshole. (Yes, Mia isn't very brave or bold. But you allegedly are in love with her and she clearly never has been. Also Mia is so emotional about her dead mother's letter she has literally just vomited. And this is the time to have a fight and break up? It's too contrived to believe that anyone would actually behave this way.)  Anyway, I liked the song lyrics and I liked the characters, I just needed a bit more believability.

Service Model (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Justice for Annie Bot! This was a fun read (also about a sentient - or is he? - robot) but not nearly as thought provoking as Annie Bot. But this is the one that made the Longlist so here we are. And it was good, just not as good, to me.

Even so, I already had this checked out because I was interested in it beforehand. It's about a robot valet who murders his master (for a reason unknown even to him) and goes on a journey of self-discovery as a result. I particularly enjoyed the ways in which each part was a homage to a classic author - to copy the cheat sheet from Goodreads: Part I KR15-T: Agatha Christie, Part II K4fk-R: Franz Kafka, Part III 4w-L: George Orwell, Part IV 80rh-5: Jorge Luis Borges, Part V D4nt-A: Dante Alighieri). 

The Christie and Kafka sections were my favorites but the whole thing is very well done. Our protagonist, Charles (or Uncharles) is a naive narrator and he encounters his Virgil, a fellow robot (or is she?) named The Wonk.  If you're interested in speculative fiction and you wish Ishiguro had written a combination of Klara and the Sun and The Remains of the Day, this is the novel for you!