My Top 5 Books from 2024 (76 books read)
Hey and welcome to my favorite books of 2024! This post is late in coming, but after a boost of inspiration I’m back.
In this article I’ll be covering:
5 Honorable Mentions
My top 5 favorite books of 2024 and why
My reading goals for 2025
I read a total of 76 books in 2024, mostly in audiobook format. This is my second year writing this style of blog post. You can read the 2023 version of this post here: Everything I read + my favorite books of 2023.
Honorable Mentions
Honorable mentions
Red Rising (2014) by Pierce Brown. Darrow is a Red, one of the miners who toil beneath the surface of Mars as part of humanity's effort to terraform the planet to one day make it habitable for those stuck on a dying Earth. Inspired by the actions of those close to him and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow leaves his Red life behind and joins the rebel organization known as the Sons of Ares. With his appearance changed, his body and mind enhanced, and his rage harnessed, Darrow is tasked with infiltrating the strict hierarchy of the Golds and rising to a position of power so that he may destroy the Society from within. The first Red Rising book follows Darrow as he enters the elite Gold academy, The Institute.
Shoe Dog (2016) by Phil Knight. Shoe Dog is a memoir by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. It chronicles the history of Nike from its founding as Blue Ribbon Sports and its early challenges to its evolution into one of the world's most recognized and profitable companies. It also highlights certain parts of Phil Knight's life. The book was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer.
Three Body Problem (2006) by Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'three body') is a 2008 novel by the Chinese hard science fiction author Liu Cixin. It is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The series portrays a fictional past, present, and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three Sun-like stars orbiting one another, a representative example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.
Ship of Magic (Liveship Traders #1) (1998) by Robin Hobb. When I was doing research for this post, I couldn’t believe that this book was written in 1998! Althea Vestrit discovers that her family’s beloved liveship, Vivacia, has been signed away in her father's will (first to her sister who then give it over) to her brutal brother-in-law, Kyle Haven. Kyle believes that he can restore the family fortune by entering the slave trade. To prove to the local law that Althea is worthy to inheret Vivacia instead of Kyle, Athea sets off to prove she is a capable sailor. Without a blood relative of the Vestrits on board, Kyle is unable to control Vivacia, and so he forces his kind and softspoken priest son Wintrow to serve aboard the ship. At the same time as all of these events, the ambitious pirate Kennit desires to become more than a pirate: he wishes to unite all pirate townships under him as king. The book follows Althea Vestrit as she tries to prove herself worthy to inherit her father’s liveship, Wintro Vestrit as he struggles with life aboard ship under his cruel father’s gaze, and Captain Kennit’s journey along the pirate isles.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. Between Two Fires is one of those novels you’ve never heard of and wonder why. Buehlman has an arresting imagination, and he can write, unlike many novelists who make the bestseller lists. It’s a bleak story but not nihilistic; there’s a redemptive arc suggesting a glimmer of hope in a world where disaster and evil too often get the upper hand. Here’s a link to a review that I thought was really relevant.
Top 5 Books
Without further or do, lets move on to my favorites in no particular order! I tried mixing it up between fiction and non-fiction, but due to personal tastes, we’re mostly going to be looking at fiction books.
New Action Fantasy Favorite - Will of the Many
Most Influential on My Life - The Artist’s Way
Most Emotionally Moving - Golden Fool
Niche to Some, Hugely Influential to Others (Romance Genre) - Heaven Official’s Blessing
A Popular but Pleasant Surprise - The DaVinci Code
Key:
💚 - a positive about the book. Something I liked. Not necessarily something everyone will like about the book.
➖ - a neutral point about the book. Something you should know.
❌ - a turn off, warning, bad part, or something generally icky about the book.
The Will of the Many by James Islington
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about a young WASP woman with dead parents and intense mommy issues in New York City in the year 2000. She takes a ton (and I mean ton) of prescription medication prescribed to her by her weirdo, awful psychiatrist to try to induce a narcotic hibernation that will last for 1 year. I liked this book better than Red Rising but I still love Red Rising.
“There comes a point in every man’s life where he can rail against the unfairness of the world until he loses, or he can do his best in it. Remain a victim, or become a survivor.” ―James Islington, The Will of the Many
💚 SIDE CHARACTERS ARE ACTUALLY SMART???!!!?? They catch the main character on his bullshit so many times it actually startled me—in a good way! They’ll come up and confront him if he’s been lying or deceiving too much.
💚 How Viz/author describes moods and rhetorical context. Like how Viz is really good at reading people and reading the room and he changes his reactions accordingly.
💚 The side plot with Vis’s adoptive father’s brother disappearing the school. The more I read, the more I liked the headmaster (who the father thinks killed his brother) and started believing his side of the story.
💚 Women characters good. Acknowledges why there are less women at the academy than men - social pressure by the all powerful government. Makes sense.
➖ Similar to Red Rising. Someone else on Reddit noticed this too… They’re both inspired by Roman hierarchy “In fact I found many similarities with Red Rising by Pierce Brown. There are also many differences but the broad strokes are the same. Vis and Darrow are both magnificent bastards that are confronted with overwhelming odds but manage to strive with cunning and pure force of will (small “w”, as opposed to “Will”).” The will of the many by James Islington - my review : r/Fantasy (reddit.com)
➖ Romance with his GF character was fast and I personally didn’t feel the chemistry (though I’m sure the straight male readers did, tbh woman you are close to = romance). But in the end of the book the girl “betrays” him because she thinks he’s corrupted some how, so she wasn’t super loyal to him anyhow. I liked this just find.
❌ The main character, Viz, is hyper competent and good at literally everything. *To the book’s credit, some of the things we think are “coinsidences” that go in Viz’s favor are actually set up by the myserious organization that backs him and wants him to succeed. So there is that.
Similar media: Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa. Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron is a 1992 self-help book to help people with artistic creative recovery. The book teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills to live a fulfilling creative life or career. Sounds exactly like what I need.
Key concepts of The Artist’s Way:
Morning pages. These are three, hand-written pages done every morning. There are no topics, no rules. Just write. Supposedly, this practice can clear whatever is causing us to feel stuck.
Artist’s dates. An artist date is a block of time, around one to two hours weekly, set aside to nurture your creative consciousness. The goal is to do something a little different and to jolt yourself out of your normal routines and thought patterns.
Weekly reading and assignments. Each of its 12 chapters deals with a different aspect of the artist’s recovery. For example, week 1 is called “Recovering a sense of safety” and week 11 is “Recovering a sense of autonomy”.
“Leap, and the net will appear.” ― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
💚 These exercises were a source for major breakthroughs in my creative healing journey. Some assignments may challenge you to think of your life and experiences in a whole new way. Some may feel frivolous or silly. Some may totally throw your week in to chaos and help root out who your fake friends are and cause them to leave your life (happened to me 😳… story time later). Overall, I found ~70% of the assignments to get me to really think and dig deep, and ~30% to be totally corny (which honestly, I may have needed). ****
💚 Yes! I’d recommend this book to anyone who is feeling burnt out or afraid to start making art. Anyone who wants to make something but somehow, somewhere, feels lost, scared, or unsure along the path.
➖ This book is pretty spiritual. Like weirdly and uncomfortably spiritual at times. Cameron is convinced that creativity doesn’t come from within, but is bestowed upon you by “The Great Creator” or “God”. To some this may be a comforting thought (you will always have creative support even if you can’t see or touch it). However I’m not going to lie, I found this hard to resonate with. But, I wouldn’t let that stop you from reading the book; the whole God thing is only in a few chapters, and the book has great passages without it. Just keep an open mind when reading.
Since I’m writing this book about a year after completing the series, here’s my long term review. Is my relationship with art healed? No, but it’s not hurting anymore. I feel like I did before I ever started drawing. My interest in art isn’t as intense as it used to be, but it also doesn’t hurt as much when I imagine myself not doing art. It’s a weird relationship and an ongoing I don’t want to say conflict or battle, but maybe… situationship? Sure. It’s a strange and egg shell walking situationship.
❌ This book recommends a consumer mindset to heal. It’s very capitalist oriented and encourages you to spend your money frivolously including picking up a shopping habit (at art stores, the mall, and thrift stores) to heal yourself. During the chapter of the book on serendipity, I ended up booking a guided art tour to Korea with an $800 that I ended up canceling because I couldn’t handle the financial guilt. Just a lesson to learn.
Similar media: Art and Fear by Austin Kleon. Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon. The Creative Act. The War of Art.
Golden Fool (2002) by Robin Hobb
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is about a young WASP woman with dead parents and intense mommy issues in New York City in the year 2000. She takes a ton (and I mean ton) of prescription medication prescribed to her by her weirdo, awful psychiatrist to try to induce a narcotic hibernation that will last for 1 year.
“…if love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love.”― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool
“You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.”― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool
💚 Over the course of four books, she’s made both Fitz and the Fool into incredibly realistic characters whom I do care about, deeply, and so it’s shocking to see how adept they can be at hurting one another when they really want to. And it’s the most plausible kind of argument, where neither is in the right and neither in the wrong (though Fitz, as usual, goes crashing into a delicate emotional situation like a bull in a china shop). Words are spoken in the heat of the moment that, as the Fool points out wearily, never needed to be spoken aloud and can now never be unspoken. It’s an important scene, because it’s one of the moments that we come closest to finding out who and what the Fool is. My favorite scene from the whole book was the one when Fitz and the Fool quarrel. It was so emotionally painful to see them throw such mean words at each other. For a major character, he remains strikingly enigmatic and Hobb isn’t about to give us any direct answers – she never does – but she teases us with hints:
You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person… You know more of the whole of me than any other person who breathes, yet you persist in insisting that all of that cannot be me. What would you have me cut off and leave behind? And why must I truncate myself in order to please you?
💚 On my last post I wrote that I really liked Jinna and how I thought she suited Fitz. Well, not so much heh? I love what Hobb did here, showing us how a person can have lots with prejudice without being bigoted, and how they are sometimes hard to spot. I just hope we’ll see more of hedge-magic anyway, because what we’ve seen so far was super interesting.
➖ There’s no plot. You heard me—there’s no plot. There are 4-5 ongoing plot strands, and 3-4 relationships that the main character must maintain and navigate. The book is all about Fitz learning to re-integrate into society and balance all of his obligations and relationships while living a somewhat secret life.
➖ Slower book. I feel like not much actually happens in this book. It’s mostly Fitz’s day to day life (sure, his days are filled with political intrigue and spying, but still) and even when we do get some action at the end (when he kills some Piebalds) it was over so fast. That being said, I read this book in 6 days and that’s the fastest I’ve read a Robin Hobb book so far. So, even though there’s not much happening adventure/action wise, it’s a really compelling book. I haven’t wrapped my head around that yet to be honest.
❌ Hap’s storyline was good, but not great. It didn’t feel as organic as Hobb’s storylines and character motivations usually are. I guess I mean that it feels like Hap got involved with that girl so his storyline would impact on Fitz’s life rather than being something the character would obviously do. Maybe I feel this way because we never saw much of Hap prior to his arrival at Buckkeep anyway.
Similar media: The Farseer Trilogy. Liveship Traders series. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
Heaven Official’s Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Danmei (Chinese: 耽美; pinyin: dānměi; lit. 'indulging beauty') is a Chinese genre of literature and other fictional media that features romantic relationships between male characters. Danmei is typically created by and targeted towards women. For this reason I was pretty skeptical of this genre and went in to reading this with some reservations. But! I promise you this novel is very genuine, entertaining, and treats its main male cast as real, 3 dimensional beings (which I honestly couldn’t even say about a lot of straight romance novels that come out of BookTok), and it is very worth the read! Heaven Official’s Blessing is one of, if not the most popular Danmei novels of all time, and with good reason.
This series about a disgraced Crown Prince named Xie Lian who, 800 years after his death, is cast down from heaven for the third time. Now only a lowly scrap collector, he must wander the earthly realm to take on tasks appointed by the heavens to pay back his debts and maintain his divinity. Eventually, he meets a mysterious young man (demon king?!) who rules the world of ghosts and terrifies the Heavens. The series follows the pair on their journey throughout heaven and Earth, and we learn how, maybe, this isn’t the first time their paths have intertwined. One thing I found pretty interesting about the book is that its main plot is hidden until the end of the book, but when you look back you can connect all of the dots and link all of the main character’s experiences into a cohesive storyline. It’s pretty cool that way! This book has an audio drama, donghua (the name for a Chinese anime), and a live action adaptation in the works (that has been postponed for over 3 years at this point due to Chinese government censorship… go figure).
💚 The fandom and the fan art are multinational and PEAK. The people making fan art and fanfiction for this book are extremely talented and motivated. Peak attracts peak.
💚 The book really does make you kick your feet and giggle when the main pair finally express attraction for each other.
💚 The plot is layered and planned out well in advance of the author starting to write the book, even though it was originally published on a weekly (daily?) schedule. It has high re-read value too because of this.
➖ Because of Chinese censorship and the popularity of the novel, it can’t be as raunchy or explicit as the author’s previous two highly popular works.
❌ Only one female character that isn’t evil. (Though to be fair many of the male characters have both male and female forms because they are gods, but only one character whose base form is female). Which is irregular for the author, because her other books have plenty of female characters (even if they are only sisters and love interests for the main cast).
Similar media: The Untamed. Little Mushroom Judgement Day.
The Davinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code follows symbologist Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris entangles them in a dispute between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus and Mary Magdalene having had a child together.
I read the first book in this series, Robert Langdon #1: Angels & Demons, last year and I was not impressed. It read like an off-brand Indian Jones novel where the main American white guy characters saves the day and saves the girl, then gets a piece of super hot European ass (😐 who is a yoga master! waow!) in the last scene of the last chapter. So, I didn’t go in to this book with high hopes, despite hearing good things about the movie adaptations when I was a child. But color me surprised! Not only is this book like super feminist (a book that revolves around Christianity being feminist, huh??!!)
The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), although Brown stated that it was not used as research material.
It is the 11th top selling fictional books of all time.
“The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches' Hammer—indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed "witches" by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women "suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.” — Dan Brown, The Davinci Code
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”―Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code
💚 How feminist this book is??? Like hello??? It was such a surprise to learn this. My impression of the first book left a strange feeling in my mouth and expected this book to do more of the same but I was really pleasantly surprised. A lot of the book explores the church’s relationship with women (not so much the other way around) and how it burned and subjugated them and other things that it did not control, like natural medicine and midwifery, throughout history. Crazy.
💚 That the main character and the female side character don’t have sex at the end. Thank frick for decorum.
💚 The books approach to modern practice of pagan religion. Without too much spoilers, it was finally nice to see a book that’s mostly about Christianity not totally dunk on alternative religion and religious practices (and I’m not taking about other big religions).
➖ SOoo American man saves the day still. But not nearly as bad or cringy as the first book. (You do not need to read the first book in this series to read The Da Vinic Code
❌ Woman character gets kidnapped and is honestly lowkey sometimes pretty useless. Good thing the male main character is there to solve the day and teach her a thing or two about her literal area of expertise (in this case, cryptography). I found this grievance to be relatively forgivable especially since the rest of the book is so interesting.
Similar media: The Fires Between by Christopher Buellman. Indiana Jones movies. Alternative history fiction books.
Trends, Interests, & Conclusion
My 2024 reading trend
I read a lot more fiction this year. Whereas in 2023 I read a lot of psychology, self help, and spiritual books, this year I focused not on healing but on escape.
My longest book: Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb - 914 pages
My shortest book: The Machine Stops by E. M. Forester - 35 pages
My reading goals
I want to read less fluff and more substance. Does this mean listening to more non-fiction? Yes and no. In 2025, I plan on reading more classic books and non-fiction. Here are a few lists I plan on taking inspiration from:
I also want to stop treating reading as a means of daily escape. This means I will cut down on the amount of waking hours I spend listening to audiobooks. In 2025, I expect my number of books to be read to be less than this years, by intention.
Finally, I want to remember more of what I read, especially the non-fiction books. To achieve this, I’ll continue to write book reviews and notes in my personal Notion hub. I want to be more intentional with my reading, and drop books more often when I don’t like them.