The best book I read this year was Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Much as I enjoyed it, it took me forever.
The copy I read is printed and physically huge, so I didn’t carry it around with me; I had it by my bed. But it’s also an intellectually challenging book that requires concentration. So I didn’t really want to read it at bedtime. It sat there for months, until I made it a priority to sit down and get through it.
The truth is, my reading habits have changed. After I moved from Singapore to China near the end of 2022, I read fewer books overall, as part of the associated swath of lifestyle changes, and a larger proportion of my reading was ebooks in 2023 and 2024. I brought plenty of printed books with me, and I still can (and do) buy printed books in English (in China and when visiting the US), but I lost the habit of carrying a paper book around, and the habit of reading just before lights out. I almost stopped reading paper books in favor of ebooks: in 2024, I read 9 printed books out of 45 total.
In 2024 especially, I took advantage of free public domain ebooks after realizing that I was buying cheap ebooks even though I don’t much like the idea of buying ebooks at all—and I know darn well I shouldn’t be buying ANY books just because they’re a bargain price! So now my goal (again, still) is to try to do a better job following the last-in-first-out rule I made that I’ve been struggling with for a while.
See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2024.
