2024 Reading Year in Review

Rating and ranking everything I read in 2024

Today’s post is simple. I’ve pored over a list of everything I read in 2024 and provided a rating and a ranking for each. I rate all books on a whole number scale between 1 and 5. Books that receive a 5 rating are, in my opinion, superlative. I would be happy to re-read any of them at any time. Books that receive a 1 rating are those that I managed to get through, but did not get much from the experience. I only rate books that I finish.

Once I assigned each book a rating, I ranked each one. A book’s rank is purely based off of how likely I am to re-read that book. I struggle not to constantly re-read most of the books that I give a 5 rating, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever re-read anything that receives a 3 or less.

Most of the books on this list are first-time reads for me. However, the books that are re-reads are marked with an asterisk (*). Here’s the list in rank order:

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5-Star Books

1. “Shane” by Jack Schaefer

2. “Emma” by Jane Austen (*)

3. “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (*)

4. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes

5. “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame

6. “The Two Towers” by J.R.R. Tolkien (*)

7. “The Fellowship of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien (*)

8. “The Return of the King” by J.R.R. Tolkien (*)

9. “The Iliad” by Homer

10. “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (*)

11. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12. “The Odyssey” by Homer

13. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling (*)

14. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by J.R.R. Tolkien

These fourteen are ones that I could read again and again. The biggest surprise for me this year was how much I enjoyed Shane. Paid subscribers can read my full review of Shane here: Shane Reviewed. I’m fairly new to the Western genre. Within the genre, I’ve only read Lonesome Dove and The Ox-Bow Incident, but be assured that I’ll seek out more great Westerns in 2025.

I’ve provided links to my preferred version of each of the books above. I highly encourage anyone with a modicum of interest in these works to check them out and let me know what you think.

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4-Star Books

15. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell

16. “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway

17. “Titus Andronicus” by William Shakespeare

18. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James (*)

19. “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens

20. “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome

21. “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare

22. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge Everman’s Pocket Poets Collection”

23. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain (*)

24. “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir (*)

25. “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography” by Humphrey Carpenter

26. “Between Two Fires” by Christopher Buehlman

27. “Trust” by Hernan Diaz

28. “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

29. “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr

30. “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer

31. “Dead Wake” by Erik Larson

This year I read a number of Shakespeare’s early plays. Titus Andronicus was a bloody farce that managed to make me laugh out loud a couple of times. The Taming of the Shrew was surprisingly funny as well. Those are the only two of his early plays that I plan to return to. You’ll find some more of Shakespeare’s early work throughout the rest of this list.

Again, I’ve provided links to my preferred version for each of the books above. The 4-Star books, I would still recommend to anyone with a little bit of interest in the book or the author. This is where I will stop providing links, as it gets a little more difficult to provide a blanket recommendation for anything that I don’t rate a 4 or above.

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3-Star Books

32. “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” by J.K. Rowling (*)

33. “The Aeneid” by Virgil

34. “The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston Leroux

35. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson

36. “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen

37. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

38. “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte (*)

39. “The Rape of Lucrece” by William Shakespeare

40. “The Comedy of Errors” by William Shakespeare

41. “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy

42. “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell

43. “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins

44. “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante

45. “When Christmas Comes” by Andrew Klavan

46. “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson

47. “Isaac’s Storm” by Erik Larson

48. “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson

49. “How to Read Novels Like a Professor” by Thomas Foster

50. “Nightmare Alley” by William Lindsay Gresham

51. “The Omen” by David Seltzer

52. “The Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe

53. “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt

54. “Return of the God Hypothesis” by Stephen Meyer

55. “The Best Minds” by Jonathan Rosen

56. “First Lie Wins” by Ashley Elston

A couple of surprises here. I expected to enjoy Virgil’s The Aeneid more than I did, especially after I had such a great time with Homer’s epics. I found it less accessible and compelling than those other works. My mind wandered often.

Also, Blood Meridian. I expected to really enjoy this one also especially after Shane. It came across as too pretentious to me, as if McCarthy was trying way too hard to be literary. I prefer some of his other work. That said, I’ll probably give Blood Meridian another try in a few years.

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2-Star Books

57. “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen

58. “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe

59. “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt

60. “A Strange Habit of Mind” by Andrew Klavan

61. “The House of Love and Death” by Andrew Klavan

62. “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

63. “The Demon of Unrest” by Erik Larson

64. “Thunderstruck” by Erik Larson

65. “The Winter King” by Bernard Cornwell

66. “Hell House” by Richard Matheson

67. “We Who Wrestle with God” by Jordan Peterson

68. “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson

69. “Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone” by Benjamin Stevenson

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1-Star Books

70. “King Henry VI” (Parts 1, 2, and 3) by William Shakespeare

71. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” by William Shakespeare

72. “From a Buick 8” by Stephen King

73. “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang

74. “Jefferson” by John Boles

75. “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing” by Matthew Perry

These six books are a bit of a mixed bag. Some of them were so forgettable that I probably wouldn’t even be able to summarize the plot without some help (e.g., “From a Buick 8” or “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”). Others I considered so poorly written that had they not been so popular at the time, I never would have finished them (e.g., “Yellow Face” and the Matthew Perry memoir).

In a year where I read 75 books, there were bound to be some misses. But overall, 2024 was a fantastic reading year. I discovered a new favorite book in Shane as well as a love for narrative poetry in works like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

If you haven’t already checked it out, you can find my planned deep reading list for 2025 below. Until next time, Happy Reading!

**Note: I’m using affiliate links for all titles recommended in this post. If you buy books through these links, I earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you so much for supporting my work!**