Longest book read this year: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Shortest books read this year: The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke – a standalone short story (unfortunately, it was kinda crap); After the Rites and Sandwiches by Kathy Pimlott – a poetry pamphlet
Authors I read the most by this year: Alice Oseman (5 rereads), Carol Shields (3 rereads); Margaret Atwood, Rachel Cusk, Pam Houston, T. Kingfisher, Sarah Manguso, Maggie O’Farrell, and Susan Allen Toth (2 each)
Publishers I read the most from: (Besides the ubiquitous Penguin Random House and its myriad imprints,) Carcanet (15), Bloomsbury & Faber (12 each), Alice James Books & Picador/Pan Macmillan (9 each)
My top author ‘discoveries’ of the year: Sherman Alexie and Bernardine Bishop
Proudest bookish achievements: Reading almost the entire Carol Shields Prize longlist; seeing The Bookshop Band on their huge Emerge, Return tour and not just getting my photo with them but having it published on both the Foreword Reviews and Shelf Awareness websites
Most pinching-myself bookish moment: Getting a chance to judge published debut novels for the McKitterick Prize
Books that made me laugh: Lots, but particularly Fortunately, the Milk… by Neil Gaiman, The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, and You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse
Books that made me cry: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss
Two books that hit the laughing-and-crying-at-the-same-time sweet spot: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Best book club selections: Clear by Carys Davies, Howards End by E.M. Forster, Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent
Best first lines encountered this year:
- From Cocktail by Lisa Alward: “The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough.”
- From A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg: “Oh, the games families play with each other.”
- From The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham: “A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.”
Best last lines encountered this year:
From The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: “Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”- From Mammoth by Eva Baltasar: “May I know to be alert when, at the stroke of midnight, life sends me its cavalry.”
- From Private Rites by Julia Armfield: “For now, they stay where they are and listen to the unwonted quiet, the hush in place of rainfall unfamiliar, the silence like a final snuffing out.”
- From Come to the Window by Howard Norman: “Wherever you sit, so sit all the insistences of fate. Still, the moment held promise of a full life.”
- From Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: “It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.”
- From Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley: “And she thought of those Victorian paintings of deathbed scenes: the soul rising vaporously out of a spent and supine body and into a starry beam of light; all tears wiped away, all the frailty and grossness of a human life transfigured and forgiven at last.”
- From Small Rain by Garth Greenwell: “Pure life.”
Books that put a song in my head every time I picked them up: I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill (“Crash” by Dave Matthews Band); Y2K by Colette Shade (“All Star” by Smashmouth)
Shortest book titles encountered: Feh (Shalom Auslander) and Y2K (Colette Shade), followed by Keep (Jenny Haysom)
Best 2024 book titles: And I Will Make of You a Vowel Sound, I Can Outdance Jesus, Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Best book titles from other years: Recipe for a Perfect Wife, Tripping over Clouds, Waltzing the Cat, Dressing Up for the Carnival, The Met Office Advises Caution
Favourite title and cover combo of the year: I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol
Best punning title (and nominative determinism): Knead to Know: A History of Baking by Dr Neil Buttery
Biggest disappointments: The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (I didn’t get past the first chapter because of all the info dumping from her research); The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett; milk and honey by Rupi Kaur (that … ain’t poetry); 2 from the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature (here and here)
A couple of 2024 books that everyone was reading but I decided not to: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, You Are Here by David Nicholls
The worst books I read this year: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin
The downright strangest books I read this year: Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, followed by The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman. All Fours by Miranda July (I am at 44% now) is pretty weird, too.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Great post! Love those first and last lines you’ve chosen
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Thanks, Cathy! Sometimes they are the most memorable thing about a book; other times the entire contents are just as brilliant.
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Mammoth as the worst book with one of the best last lines is interesting!
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Ha ha, it is a strange combination! I didn’t much care for Private Rites overall either.
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I think Howard’s End is on my (now very slow/somewhat abandoned) Classics Club list. Perhaps 2025 is my year to pick it up.
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Soooooo good! Have you read other Forster novels?
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Yes, A Room with a View, which I loved.
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Excellent post! Such an unsettling cover for Zombie Vomit Mad Libs (which I first read as Limbs).
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Yes, the cover and title do suggest the oddness of the contents…
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Thank you on Tracy Chevalier–exactly why I dnf-ed. And, I tried You Are Here but…no…just…no. Year of Living Biblically is fun! Part-time Indian has been on my TBR forever–maybe your post will get me to finally move it up the list?
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Yeah, I didn’t get far at all with the Nicholls, maybe a chapter or two.
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Same here…..
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I’m not surprised about the Nin book. She was very popular in the 70s, so I tried to read her. Ugh.
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This one that I read was published in 1954. It was definitely dated, almost amusingly bad.
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I’m not sure when the book I read was published, probably about then, but for some reason everyone was reading her in college in the 1970s.
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What fun! I love that you record first and last lines. They’re great.
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The most notable ones get recorded in an ongoing file.
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Everything about this is such fun to read: I love how you’ve summarised and presented stuff. And a great combo of details and images.
I was going to ask if I’d missed your having read Miranda July’s book (as part of the “something everyone else read, but not me” category but I see you’re in the middle! It arrived at a due-date clustery time for me, so I returned it as soon as I picked it up, and I haven’t gotten back to it (and might not, it seems to call for a certain kind of mood and I’m pretty sure I’m not in it, maybe ever).
I don’t think I’ve read four (or more) books by the same author this year, although each year there is usually one author who makes an appearance in that sense: I’ve kinda missed that sense of brief immersion. (OH, but I guess if I counted those exact same Shields’ collections. heheh But mine were bound. /laughs)
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Thanks! It’s a fun post to put together and I try to work on it through the year so I don’t forget anything (I had a running list of first and last lines, anyway).
I’m at 62% in the July, I think. I’d read one of her novels before and been rather befuddled by it. This is a lot more straightforward, though still with her deadpan humour, and has many, many quotable lines about marriage, independence, desire, the fear that life ends at menopause, etc. It’s had an enormous cultural impact, e.g., there was a Guardian headline just the other day about the phenomenon of women ditching their lives after reading it!
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Hunh, maybe I”ll have to give it a try. After the second I had pretty much decided she wasn’t for me, but all the press did give me pause. And now that headline?! Sheesh.
I finished my stat’s yesterday and I ended up reading 4 by Amor Towles and 3 by Dinaw Mengestu (backlist reading for review work, so I guess they didn’t lodge in my mind because, work) but I also forgot Dunyah Mikail’s books which came via ILL and I did choose those. Maybe I’ll try to make a point of some mini-binges this year. I’m still thinking about 2025’s possibilities.
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Ha – I refused to read those two, too, also Tom Lake (if it was called that and if it came out in 2024, the one with the daisies on that went on about a play everyone in the US knows and I’d never heard of). I wish I’d taken more note of first/last lines in mine now!
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Yep, that’s Tom Lake. Controversial opinion: not an essential one from Patchett’s oeuvre. But you don’t need to know the play referenced; I barely do.
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[…] determinism of chef and food historian Dr Neil Buttery’s name, earned this a place in my 2024 Superlatives post. In not quite 240 pages, it achieves the improbable, producing an exhaustive history of baked […]
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