SJ
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2024 End of Year: Books

Well, I’m clearly getting stupidly behind on this whole End of Year blog list stuff now. Maybe a lesson on planning a little better next year, I think!

Anyhow, having posted the list of films I watched in 2024, I’m going to follow it up with a list of all the books I read in 2024. My reading year was a lot more successful than my film-watching year, insomuch as I read more books than I watched films, and I enjoyed those books more than I enjoyed most of those films!

I was trying to read more than I did in 2023, where I found was increasingly reading short-form stuff (articles, blog posts and the like) rather than proper full-length books, and so set myself a loose goal of reading 26 books in the year, or one every two weeks. This was a fairly arbitrary number, but felt like enough to force myself to make the effort, and not lapse back. In the end I just about got there, finishing the last book on this list over the Christmas break.

I started the year with a run of books from the Games Workshop publishing arm, Black Library. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve been involved in the hobby, but it still nice to touch back with the Grimdark now and then. Their lengthy series of books covering the events of the Horus Heresy finally came to a - broadly satisfying - conclusion with the Siege of Terra mini-series, all reflected below.

Outside of that, as ever I’ve tried to read a mix of stuff, little bit of fiction, little bit of history, little bit of popular science, little bit of this and that. Of the rest on the list my favourite was Blue Machine by Helen Czierski, a book about how the ocean system works and influences the environment and everything. Utterly fascinating and easy to read.

So, preamble over, here is my reading list for 2024;

*I haven’t found a book equivalent to Letterboxd that I like, and can link to, so here’s links to these books at Waterstones.