Books I'm Glad I Read In 2024

plus, how I boosted my total reading time by 30%

I don’t so much set forward-looking reading goals - at least not in terms of number of books or pages read. But I do enjoy the look-back at what I read each year, and I am always looking for ways to make reading a more fun and enriching part of my life.

In 2024 I read 26 books. Twenty-six! It’s a personal best for me since I started tracking my reads in 2019, and yet it’s a fraction of what a lot of serious readers log in a year. I feel great about that number, as it's an average of a finished book every two weeks. I pick long books, some of them hard to get through (but worth it, usually), and I almost never abandon a book. I don’t tend to skim or skip, and I don’t log a book as ‘read’ in my Goodreads unless I truly read the whole thing: Introduction through Acknowledgments¹.

You can see the whole collage of titles I read in 2024 at the bottom of this post, but first, a few that stand out as I look back at the year:

Recommended By No One, Loved By Me

Notes from the Henhouse: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing (Elspeth Barker)

I pulled this off the shelf at my local public library because I loved the cover image² and the subtitle. Wasn’t familiar with the author (or her famous poet husband), ended up loving her writing style and the intimate peek into a mid- to late-life writer’s world.

Most Unique ‘Reading’ Experience

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (Dolly Parton)

This year I listened to four total audiobooks, all nonfiction - and that’s a lot more than prior years! I like podcasts for audio, Kindle or physical copies for books. Usually. But I’m starting to figure out which books do work for me in audio form.

This was an utterly delightful listen. I am pretty sure the physical book is like a coffee table book, with photographs, probably visuals like Dolly’s handwritten lyric drafts, etc. What I missed in visuals I got back in spades in song clips and in Dolly’s own reading of her words. There’s brief narration by a not-Dolly voice at the beginning of each section, and then it’s just the gal herself talking about where she was when she wrote a song, what inspired it, and how it fit into her career. She tells a ton of stories about her collaborators over the years, and it felt to me almost like the guest-only half of a juicy longform podcast interview. With song clips!

Still Thinking About This

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Priya Parker)

I first encountered this book via a podcast interview the author gave on We Can Do Hard Things (you can listen here - I recommend it!). I couldn’t stop thinking about the concepts from the interview and so I listened to the audiobook early in 2024.

I am still thinking about this stuff: gathering with intention, whether it’s a committee meeting, a creative retreat, a book club, a family ritual, or a girls’ night. Honestly, a big part of what I want to explore in this newsletter is being in community three-dimensionally, IRL, in the spaces where we live and socialize. So yes, I’m still thinking on this.

There’s A Reason Everyone’s Talking About This One

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin)

As we’ve established, I read a lot less than many avid readers, and I read less fiction than nonfiction. This year my ratio of f:nf was 9:17, so just a little better than half as many novels as self-help+memoir+psychology+essays+etc.

Still, I like to dip into the books that it seems like everybody’s talking about, and I patiently waited for, like, a year for this one to be available from the Libby app through my library so I could read it on my Kindle. I loved it. My husband loved it. There’s a reason everybody loved it. It’s just good storytelling.

Worth The Re-Read

As a child, I re-read books constantly. So constantly that it worried my mother, who tried to entice me to read new titles by wrapping them up like presents (with ribbon!) and gifting them to me to unwrap. Post-childhood, I almost never re-read books. Not never-never, but really-almost-never.

But. This year I felt drawn to revisit two books: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Lori Gottlieb) and How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question (Michael Schur). I think I read both of them for the first time in 2021, and I’ve recommended both to so many friends and family since then.

Both books occupy a space I love: funny first-person narrative nonfiction with a subject matter I can learn more about while having a good time. The first time I read How To Be Perfect on my Kindle, but for the re-read I listened to it in the car with my pre-teen and teenage kids, who know the author’s work as big fans of The Good Place. The audiobook has voice-cameos by characters from the show, which is super fun - and the subject matter is PERFECT for teenagers.

I’m So Excited To Talk More About This Book… Later.

The Last Parenting Book You'll Ever Read: How We Let Our Kids Go and Embrace What's Next (Meagan Francis)

I finished (an advanced copy of) this book last night and can’t wait to say more. For now, I’ll encourage any mother of big-ish kids to immediately pre-order it at the link above or from anywhere you buy books. I know she’s my business BFF, my co-host, my partner in podcast crime, and my other half in so many ways, but none of that colors my opinion that this is really thought-provoking reading for midlife, bigger-kids-bigger-problems, what-the-hell-is-next-for-me mothers.

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One final note: I increased my reading in 2024 by 30%, and honestly, that snuck up on me. I didn’t feel like I was reading more, but the addition of a few audiobooks, being willing to be working through a couple books at the same time (which I never used to do), and - wait for it - quitting Instagram all contributed to where I land today, on December 31, having had my best reading year in a long time. Hooray!

1. I have this dorky thing where I always read the acknowledgments. I find it a revealing little window into the author’s personal circles and regular daily writing life, and if nothing else I like perusing a variety of given names and surnames.

2. If I’m being honest, it’s the cat on the counter that sealed the deal. I KNOW they do not belong on the counter. But THEY don’t know that, and I appreciate the solidarity in this regard.