A Year of Book Blogging
I can't decide if it feels like a year since I started blogging about my reading or not - and if it doesn't, I can't decide whether it feels like longer or like much less time has passed. What does a year actually feel like? I don't know.
This blog started as a written journal of my reading before I decided to start typing up some of those notes on Cohost. Cohost is now dead, and I still miss it, but my physical journal is still going strong and I started a new one for 2025 a few weeks ago.
This has been a very good year for reading. One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was to get away from the numbers-driven approach to reading encouraged by sites like GoodReads, but I'm going to take a second to look at numbers anyway. Here are my figures for the past 12 months:
- 168 books started, 29 DNFs, 139 completed
- 27 marked as "favourites"
- 130 novels
- 31 novellas
- 7 nonfiction books
- 5 anthologies/short fiction/poetry collections
I find it really interesting that the number of books I've marked as favourites is so similar to the number of books I DNFd. I don't know if that says anything about me as a reader or not and I'm not going to try and draw any conclusions from a single data point, but it's a fun little parallel anyway.
The books I marked as favourites - and corresponding blog posts about them, where they exist - were:
- The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
- Strangers - Taichi Yamade
- How Much Of These Hills Is Gold - C Pam Zhang
- Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Ship Beneath The Ice - Mensun Bound
- Looking Glass Sound - Catriona Ward
- Bear Season - Gemma Fairclough
- Call Me By Your Name - André Aciman
- Beartooth - Callan Wink
- The Bullet Swallower - Elizabeth Gonzalez James
- Roadwork - Stephen King
- When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain - Nghi Vo
- Mammoths At The Gates - Nghi Vo
- The Brides Of High Hill - Nghi Vo
- In Ascension - Martin MacInnes
- Sift - Alissa Hattman
- Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel
- The Saint of Bright Doors - Vajra Chandrasekera
- The Siege of Burning Grass - Premee Mohammed
- The Safekeep - Yael van Der Wouden
- All The Sinners Bleed - S. A. Cosby
- Choice - Neel Mukherjee
- It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over - Anne de Marcken
- Only If You're Lucky - Stacy Willingham
- Lie With Me - Phillipe Besson
- After Lorca - Jack Spicer
- Shroud - Adrian Tchaikovsky
It's interesting to look back on this list and see how my opinions of some of these books have changed since I read them. I don't think I would include Stacy Willingham's Only If You're Lucky here now - it was fun, I enjoyed it a lot, but I don't think I'd call it a "favourite" in the same way as something like The Safekeep. If I had to condense this down into a top 5 for the year it would look something like this:
- The Safekeep. This is an easy pick as my favourite book this year. I've been evangelical about it, thrusting it into the hands of whoever would stand still long enough to listen to me talk about it. It's wonderful and I still think it should have won the Booker.
- The Brides of High Hill. Three of the five books from Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle made my list of favourites this year, and each one is better than the last. They're all great but this final book in the sequence (so far) is leagues above the others. It pays off all of the emotional weight of the preceding books in a beautiful, haunting way. I think this would have been my top pick this year if not for The Safekeep.
- Headshot. A surprisingly divisive book, this. I loved it and I think it should have made the Booker shortlist.
- Choice. This is just really, really good. I love the ambiguity of it and the things it has to say about the ways we construct meaning from stories.
- After Lorca. The book that convinced me I need to read more poetry. This does a lot of the things that I love in postmodernism, and was a very surprising read for me.
I also started reading short fiction again this year. I haven't tracked that quite as rigorously as I've tracked the longer form work I read, but here were my favourite five pieces I read this year:
- 'The Paper Menagerie', Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
- 'The Things', Peter Watts (Clarkesworld)
- 'Great Martian Railways', Hûw Steer (Analog, July/August 2024)
- 'The Dust Queen', Aliette de Bodard (Reach For Infinity)
- 'Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges', Isabelle Fang (McSweeney's 75)
I set out with the best intentions of reading a magazine a month and writing about it but I just wasn't able to keep up with it. That's fine, frankly. I'm still reading more short fiction than I was at the start of the year. I've also renewed my Granta subscription, which I'm very happy about.
At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of reading 30 books. I obviously smashed through that, and as I look towards next year I'm very much of the opinion that numerical reading goals are useful if you aren't reading much and want to change that (which was me at the beginning of the year, having fallen out of the habit somewhat) but are otherwise bullshit. With that in mind, I've set some reading goals for the coming year that feel a bit more meaningful.
- 25% of my reading to be poetry or non-fiction
- 50% of the fiction I read to be in translation
- Continue writing this blog and maybe start doing some Booktok stuff
That's it. My goal is to expand my reading, basically, and to keep being excited about the books that I'm reading in public. I also want to read War And Peace, but I'm currently down a deep rabbit hole of working out which translation I want to read, so who knows when I'll actually make a decision and crack the spine on it.
If you've been reading this blog this year then thank you. It's been a lot of fun writing it. Have a good new year, and I'll see you in 2025.