Books I read in 2024

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff

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.

Total Quantity

In 2024 I read 45 books. My average since 1999 is 82/year, so this seems like really not a lot. But at least it’s better than 2023, my first year in China!

For comparison:

In 2023, I read 27 books.
In 2022, I read 45 books.
In 2021, I read 52 books.
In 2020, I read 61 books.
In 2019, I read 62 books.
In 2018, I read 79 books.
In 2017, I read 55 books.
In 2016, I read 63 books.
In 2015, I read 100 books!
In 2014, I read 100 books!

There must have been years that were more than 82, if the average turns out to be 82, right? Yeah, for a while I was really trying to read 100 books a year… Those days are over. Now I’m reading more serious fiction and serious nonfiction, whereas previously, I read a lot of relatively breezy fantasy novels and books of comic strips, for example. But who knows what the future will bring! In different circumstances, I’d absolutely go back to reading, say, dozens of middle-grade chapter books by authors like Andrew Clements (author of Frindle) or whatever, and the numbers would go back up.

Maximum Length and Average Length

I have a sort of tradition of trying to read at least one book a year that’s over 1,000 pages. (After typing that sentence, I got distracted and wrote an entire blog post about this.)

The longest book of the year 2024 was The Complete Sherlock Holmes, a one-volume ebook collection that includes 4 novels and 56 short stories, a total of 658,425 words. At, say, 450 words/page (that’s pretty dense), that’s 1,463 pages; a conservative lower bound.

If you count the two ebook halves of Democracy in America as one book (I didn’t), then it’s pretty long, but not 1,000 pages; only 731 by the calculation above (187,832 words + 141,542 words = 329,374 words).

The average book length over the whole year of 2024 was: 337 pages.

For comparison, the average length for my entire book log is 286 pages, so… this year’s books were, on average, longer than average… as impossible as that sounds at first glance, haha. (“Listen… do you smell something?”)

Format

Like I said, in 2024 I read a lot of classic fiction because I could read them as free ebooks on my phone. Reading free ebooks is why I bought a Kindle in 2015, but I already carry a smartphone around everywhere… so that’s what I mostly use now.

During the Covid lockdown, I downloaded a bunch of AmazonClassics ebooks when Amazon made them free. Most of them are US$2.99 each now, unless you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

If you missed out on grabbing those at the opportune time, you can still legitimately get the same titles elsewhere for free (and then “send to Kindle” if you want).

Speaking of opportune, this year I bought a Humble Bundle containing Kobo versions of almost all the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett for like $1 each. That’s how I got the “Young Discworld” books listed below. (Sorry, that offer is expired.)

Content

24 of the books were fiction and 21 were nonfiction.

Top 6 books read in 2024

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff (1987)
Abstract thinking about thinking; linguistic analysis from a cognitive science or cognitive psychology perspective. (Soooo much more sensible than the generative theory I was taught!)

What’s Our Problem by Tim Urban (2023)
A liberal blogger approaches political polarization (especially extreme low-rung leftism) from the perspective of social psychology and makes his theories accessible with cute and colorful amateur drawings.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1996)
Abstract thinking about how our abstract thinking in science evolves. This edition contains interesting additional material in which he responds to critics of his controversial theory.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
As gripping a survival story as The Martian. But don’t read the sequel, which is bundled into the AmazonClassics edition. And don’t read it if the racist colonialism of the period upsets you.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett (2001)
Reminds me of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, but has more to say.

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908)
This is the second time I read it; the first time I read it I wrote a blog post about it. The theme of sincerity still impresses me.

Categorized complete list of books read in 2024 follows below.

English and American classics

  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Kidnapped (David Balfour 1) by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Catriona (David Balfour 2) by Robert Louis Stevenson

  • The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  • Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
  • The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster
  • A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

  • Robinson Crusoe (also including The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) by Daniel Defoe
  • Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
  • The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Foreign classics

  • Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss (originally written in Swiss German)
  • Heidi by Johanna Spyri (originally written in Swiss German)

 

  • Democracy in America: Part 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville (originally written in French)
  • Democracy in America: Part 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville (originally written in French)
  • The Red and the Black by Stendhal (originally written in French)

Young Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett

  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
  • The Wee Free Men (Tiffany Aching series book 1)
  • A Hat Full of Sky (Tiffany Aching series book 2)
  • Wintersmith (Tiffany Aching series book 3)
  • I Shall Wear Midnight (Tiffany Aching series book 4)
  • The Shepherd’s Crown (Tiffany Aching series book 5)

 

Other fiction

Nonfiction

  • Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff (Linguistics)

  • Suzhou Museum by the Suzhou Museum (China)
  • A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-Lan (China)

  • Eagle’s Nest Obersalzberg in a Historical View (Germany)
  • Guide to Munich (Germany)
  • Nymphenburg: Palace, Park and Pavilions (Germany)

  • The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science by Scott L. Montgomery (Science and Writing)
  • Scientific Writing for Chinese Researchers by Olen Rambow (Science and Writing)
  • Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English by Hilary Glasman-Deal (Science and Writing)

These are related to my job at the editorial office of Intelligent Computing at Zhejiang Lab.

  • What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies by Tim Urban
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Third Edition) by Thomas S. Kuhn
  • Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
  • Knowing What We Know by Simon Winchester
  • Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf

Familiar authors

23 of the books are by familiar authors; that is, I’ve read at least one of their books before. In particular:

  • George Lakoff – Metaphors We Live By
  • Jackie Chan – I Am Jackie Chan
  • Arthur C. Clarke – in high school before I started keeping a log, I read 2001: A Space Odyssey and some sequels. After that, according to the log, I also read: Earthlight, Cradle, Childhood’s End, The 9 Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, The Sands of Mars, and Dolphin Island.
  • Veronica Roth – Divergent series
  • Eve Sprunt – in 2020, I read a draft of the book Passionate Persistence about the life of her mother, the children’s author Ruth Chew
  • Simon Winchester – The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Fracture Zone, The Map That Changed the World, The Surgeon of Crowthorne
  • Steven Pinker – The Sense of Style, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works

Re-reading

I like the book lists at listchallenges.com, especially lists of classic literature and classic children’s literature, but what’s frustrating is that I’m not always sure whether I should check something off the list or not! There are some books I know I read in high school before I started keeping records; there are some books I’m pretty sure I read as an elementary or middle school student; and there are others that I only think I might have read. The obvious solution is to just read them now, so that they go in my official record. Even if I did read them before, it’s been more than 25 years at this point (!), so I probably don’t remember much anyway. Some of the books I read in 2024, I read in accordance with this logic.

  • I saw a movie of Heidi in 2015.
  • I read Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky in 2006, Wintersmith in 2009.
  • I read Democracy in America in college.
  • I feel I must have read Black Beauty before, just not sure when; I think it was an audiotape (yes, tape) I listened to as a kid. Also, I used an extract from it as an English teacher in 2012/2013).
  • In high school, I read a Sherlock Holmes omnibus (not sure what was in it) and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
  • I must have read A Little Princess and The Secret Garden—and/or my mom read them to me; I’ve also seen the Shirley Temple movie of A Little Princess and a play of The Secret Garden, and possibly also a movie of The Secret Garden.
  • I’m pretty sure I read Kidnapped in high school.
  • I read A Room with a View in 2018 and A Passage to India in 2004.

All together now!

           

That’s it for 2024!

» Visit my complete book log!