Welcome to my year in reading! Barring a few books inhaled between mince pies in twixtmas, this is a round up of all the books I read in 2024, including my top ten favourites.

Let me know what your books of the year were, I'd love to know.

I read 70 books this year, an increase of eight on last year. My biggest genre by far was what I would call literary fiction, of which I read 29 books. Much lower down, I read nine non-fiction books and nine fantasy books.

My most productive month was November, when I read eight books, but I was helped along by four of those being books I re-read, which always means I speed along. Those books were in fact the only four that I re-read all year, and I also read just seven books that were published before 2000. So I have clearly been into the new and shiny this year!

That little spurt of re-reading means Naomi Novik makes it into the list of my top read authors this year, alongside Laura Wood and Katherine Rundell - I read four books a piece from all three of them. As well as my most read authors all being women, my top ten books were also all authored by women.

The authors of the books I read came from 13 different countries, with the vast majority from either the UK or USA, and I only read two books in translation this year, which is very low! Sadly I was also pretty low on my numbers of authors from a non-white background, with only 18 out of 70, making roughly a quarter of my reading. This is marginally better than last year, but does serve as a helpful reminder to be more proactive in 2025.

I spent £71.93 on my books this year. My average spend of £1 a book is a testament to my heavy use of the library, which was the source of 50 of the books I read.

Now let's dive in to my top ten, in no particular order, here we go!

Fiction

The Explorer by Katherine Rundell

The first of two books by Rundell on this list, it was my absolute favourite of her fiction efforts. It follows the survival of a group of children who have crash landed in the Amazon. It's beautiful and devastating in the best way. It cemented my intent to read everything she's ever written (and now also listen to every podcast she's ever done).

Read it if you... love an adventure story with a side order of emotional devastation.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

This had been on my to-read list for so long that it was a relief to finally tick it off. And even more of a relief to know that it was indeed an incredible piece of writing. The way Mantel makes the lives and loves of people who lived hundreds of years ago so vital and immediate is incredible. She was one in a million. I'm aiming to read the next one in the series in 2025.

Read it if you... are bored of the Tudors and need a reminder of why they're fascinating.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

Although my full appreciation of this was hampered by my complete ignorance of American history (who shot Lincoln is quite important to know going in), I was still totally swept along by this story of a theatrical family struggling to find their way in 1800s America. I read it in May but I still think about it regularly.

Read it if you... like stories about family drama.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Although I had some issues with the peripheral details of this story, I thought the overall set up of a civil servant minding a time traveller was brilliant, and it had an excellent pay off at the end. It was great fun to read and it felt like it was probably great fun to write too.

Read it if you... enjoy a skewering of British norms and an offbeat romance.

Olga dies dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

I really enjoyed this story of a woman struggling to separate herself from her mother, who always saw the cause before the child. It's also a cultural exploration capsule of the Puerto Rican community in New York, which I enjoyed as a perspective I had never read about before. It's also got a lovely romance running throughout.

Read it if you... like experiencing another point of view.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

It's hard to describe this book without using the word swashbuckling, because this story of a pirate turned parent, brought back in to the piratical game for one last big score, is the perfect novel set on the high seas. It had scary monsters, demonic ex-husbands, and a fun way of exploring being a working mum. It's going to be a trilogy, and I am so looking forward to the next two.

Read it if you... need new perspectives on parenthood that could be piratical.

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

After reading the tomes of her Neapolitan quartet last year, this year I opted for this slim volume, where you can see her experimenting with all the themes that she picks up with greater detail elsewhere. Motherhood, loss of identity, deception, aging, so much of it was explored in less than 200 pages. It was also incredibly tense, almost suffocatingly so.

Read it if you... want to feel tense or validated for your feelings about motherhood.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

To be honest I was slightly surprised to see this come up in my top ten, but then when I reflected on it I realised I did enjoy it a lot. The story of a lonely boy and his equally lonely mother was a springboard for big thoughts about what it means to be human, what power stories have in our lives, and how we can pull each other out of the holes we've got ourselves in.

Read it if you... need a reminder about the good side of humanity.

Non-fiction

The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell

A gorgeous book in hardback, it has beautiful illustrations of animals that Rundell celebrates through mini-essays. From the swift, to the giraffe, to the pangolin, she reminds us of the incredible beauty all around us, and of our responsibility to look after it.

Read it if you... want to feel a sense of wonder.

Matrescence by Lucy Jones

This book totally blew my mind in the way it explored the biological and psychological effects that carrying and caring for a child have on a woman. We're so separated from our bodies nowadays and it can be easy to think that parenthood is an entirely mental game, when in fact it's really one being played by every part of your biology.

Read it if you... want to understand an experience of motherhood, either your own or someone else's.

And that's a wrap! I hope wherever you are you're having a very Merry Christmas. See you in the new year! And do drop me a line to let me know your book(s) of the year.

And if you'd like to give me a Christmas present, then please forward this email on to someone you think would like it.

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