Best of 2024

Hi and welcome to my 2024 wrap-up!

2024 was not the best year I’ve ever had. It started with fatigue, and then heartache upon heartache when a fox caught most of our hens as well as our cockerel, when we had to have our seventeen-year-old cat put to sleep and when one of our two remaining hens died of old age. Then the herding of new chickens started, and then the herding of two kittens. Suffice it to say that my ability to focus on books went right out the window and never fully returned. Fickle Frieda set up camp, I was the moodiest mood reader ever, and it’s a small miracle I was able to read as much as I did. Many times I couldn’t find the escape in books I so desperately craved, so the ones I’m highlighting below deserve your attention, cos they were the ones that managed to get me out of my head and into their pages.

I didn’t set myself any “official” bookish goals or challenges, and I won’t for 2025 either. Some days, you just have to be happy to be reading at all. I did want to aim for one Spanish book a month, and I (more or less) kept that up, which is definitely a goal for 2025 as well. Since I no longer need Spanish at work, reading in Spanish is the one thing making sure I don’t lose it entirely.

I also kept a book budget, for the first time ever. It was quite flexible but it made me more aware of my spending and it encouraged me to have patience and wait for prices to go down or books to become available on Everand or until I could read them on Kindle Unlimited when I was able to sign up for another free, or heavily discounted, trial period. So that’s another spreadsheet I carried over to 2025.

In numbers 2024 looks like this:

2024
I read 66,718 pages across 210 novels, novellas and short stories
I listened for 693 hours to 112 audiobooks

But out of 322 books, what were my favourites, what are the books that kept me glued to their pages and made me forget all else?

Let’s start with a shout-out to four series I discovered in 2024 that helped shape my bookish year:

I binged the DS Walker series by Patricia Wolf, an excellent Australian crime series with a massive sense of setting. I can’t wait for the next instalment!

I discovered Freida McFadden through her Housemaid series and I read no fewer than 12 of her books in 2024, she always has me hooked!

I finally gave in to the numerous people telling me to give Angela Marsons’s Kim Stone series a shot and read the first 5 instalments in Spanish. I’m looking forward to continuing this series this year.

And I gave in to temptation ordered the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros cos, you know, dragons, and enjoyed them so much I have the third book on preorder. I’m not a fan of the spice but so far I’ve managed to ignore it thanks to the fantastic action scenes.

A shout-out to a few older books that I finally read in 2024, all fantastic reads that I should have read much earlier:

And a shout-out to a book I read and loved in 2023 but was published in 2024:

2024 brought fantastic new instalments to some of my favourite series, so do check these out if you haven’t already:

I’m going to cheat a little here and add Dark As Night, Living Is a Problem and The Mercy Chair, which I read just after New Year’s but since they were published in 2024 and I really should have read them last year, they made the list anyway! Sue me 😂

And these fantastic reads are my 20 of 2024, an eclectic mix from an eclectic reader.

Thanks for joining me today! Seen any of your favourites among mine? I wish you all a fabulous 2025 and here’s to a whole new year of book love 🥂