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A Year in Books: My top Books of 2024 & Reading Stats

Updated: Jan 3


Here we go again - at the end of a year and boy what a year it was. Too much has changed for me to process just yet, I've been to Germany, Transylvania, Italy and Austria, my heart is topped, my health has been ehh... you know just the usual things. But the intensity man, the intensity, the very emotional intensity...


And I wish I could say reading was consistent, but I'm the type of person who finds reading increasingly hard when my mind is stuck on things, when my heart is involved, drifting - when there are massive things to work through. Those times, I write more and read less. With all that being said, I do have my StoryGraph stats and can't wait to share them with you.


First things first though, if you are going through things and if you are the person who cannot dive into books at length when life requires all your emotional presence (but, of course, there are those people as well who find it easier to dive into reading when life gets rough - all adoration and respect for them of course), you might want to consider going short form. Reading poetry, prose poetry, picture books, or tiny, experimental forms, things you might be able to tackle only in a few minutes, could be your best friends.

I would recommend..


1.) Reading something that will make you laugh:

The Little Nicholas series - a French children's books series is absolutely hilarious for adults too. (Possibly even more so.)

Find one of the books (Nicholas and the Gang) here:


2.) Reading poetry:

Especially Emily Dickinson. Anyone who has read Emily Dickinson knows that she is rather dense, but we also know that many of her poems are also short - she famously wrote them on scraps of paper or envelopes, her microscopic universes take only a few seconds to read and will allow you to carry their effect with you, and mingle with your day. I find this duality so very helpful. Exiting mind processes, when emotions are heavily involved, feels next to impossible (to me), my new approach is not to push myself. Something we can do, however, is to lift something else, something outer next to our ordinary chaos and let it dilute all the troubles a bit. You are confused what the heck I mean? Imagine thinking about how hard life is - during your lunch break. And then imagine thinking about how hard life is + Emily Dickinson - during your lunch break. The latter sounds less stressful to me. And it has been working, I swear.


3.) Reading something that can be read fragmented:

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese writer jotting down thoughts, seemingly random ones. It turned out to be an act of modernist literature (published under the title of The Book of Disquiet), something I hope to tackle and write about in 2025. For now, check out a lovely Guardian article about him here:


Up next:

My Bookish Update Section

My growing Alice collection has a new participant, a book that joined for its endearing interactivity. I collect Alice editions I find special, and if you've spent time on this blog, you might have come across my Alice movies ranking here:


Mind that it is an absolutely biased list of a really non-movie person who got rather upset over a few things in those movies. Otherwise, please do have a look, you might find a movie you want to watch.


And my new Alice book - an incredible - and massive Minalima edition (for look at how thick it is!)



find it here:


Up next:

Four (seemingly) random books that would be nice to tackle this year.


Why do we have this section at all? Because I was incredibly lucky to have received a bookish Advent calendar that was composed of book recommendations. Possibly one of the best gifts I have ever received, if not the best. And why four and not three or five books? I was aiming for three but could not shorten my shortlist enough, so here we go (in no particular order but kept short in explanation):


1.) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Why? I've heard it was unconventional and genre-bending, and those are things I only LOVE. I listened to This is Water by him in 2024 and was not as big of a fan as I wanted to be, but I will give Infinite Jest a try. And we will know once and for all, whether I just didn't vibe with This is Water or I am just simply not David Foster Wallace's target audience. (Which would be okay too, of course.)


2.) Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Check out the winner of my reading year and you will know why.


3.) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Why? This is a book I started reading once and loved it, but then life deterred me and I never finished it. If I think about it now, I am convinced it happened because there was a better timing for the book, will it be a life-changing read? We might find it out in 2025.


4.) Watership Down by Richard Adams. Why? I don't know. It might be that it sounds just as much of a human tale as Animal Farm - also told through the story of animals. I expect it to be a massive work of wisdom, or at least horrifyingly candid on our world.


I don't promise I will read these books, but I will, for sure, keep my eyes open. If I happen to run into them in a secondhand bookstore (although the Kundera one, I already have), I will take it as a sign.


Up next:

My StoryGraph statistics:


I am a slow reader, and also, I often read books that are not up on The StoryGraph (or anywhere, for that matter) - for example, tiny self-published essays or review collections, so my analytics will not be precise. Still, The StoryGraph is my choice of program to track my reading, I like it far more than Goodreads. If you want to know more about it, you can read my take on them here:


But anyway, let's see what The StoryGraph had to say about my reading year in 2024.


Firstly, I don't know how many books I've read as I often read outside of their system, but as I am a slow reader, I suspect the number to be around 50.


Firstly: My preferred Genres:


Preferred Moods:


Preferred Pace:


Fiction and non-fiction ratio:

(I'm a big fan of essays!)


Format:


Page Number:



Up next - last but not least...

My top three reads of the year:


Nr.3.: A Book that I Had Sewn into my Fate: The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones

If you know, you know. I associate this book with a heartbreak - or rather, the lack of this book, the fact I couldn't find it when I needed it. Back then, I promised myself I would wait until it found me, wouldn't look for it, wouldn't order it online. Wouldn't chase it. This whole blog is built on this book in a sense. In 2024, this book found me. The way it found me, I will not share as it is very personal, but what I can say is that it was a glorious turn of my tale. The story I am. Since then, I have finally read it and its beauty was just as captivating as I'd originally anticipated. The Polish Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize winner for a reason, she manages to say a lot in this stunning picturebook - but with not too many words. No surprise, it's about simplicity resisting the suffocating nature of our running world: A man loses his soul. He waits. Joanna Concejo (an incredible Polish illustrator) manages to build much sensitivity in her drawings, they are delicate, detailed, beautiful in the original sense of the word. Not in the social media, obsession sense.


And read my first ever post - about this very book - here: https://www.fearlessfrock.com/post/those-wild-dreams-of-ours-what-a-joke-what-a-hope


Nr. 2: A Book I thought I Would Dislike: A Passage to India by E.M. Forster


It's no surprise to those who know me and my taste, that I am a rather modern reader - I enjoy challenging, language-reflecting works, for I am quite a slow reader and not in the reading game for tackling hundreds of books yearly. I love slowing down. It often happens that I keep re-reading paragraphs for whole days (something I also do when I write: I write tiny pieces for an unreasonable length of time.) Classics in a pre-20th century sense are rarely my cup of tea (I've been listening to Emma as an audiobook - at this point for almost a good year - and have been finding it genuinely hilarious, but apart from a few cases, my loves live in the 20th century). But hey, E.M. Foster kinda lived in the 20th century! - you might say. Well, he lived through the turn of the century, but he feels less modern to me than the real modernist souls. I picked up A Passage to India in Munich, a little shabby copy that has - of course! - fallen since that apart. Well, anyway, no shame in that, I've loved it dearly. E. M. Forster is mainly known for A Room with a View which I desperately want to read now. A Passage to India is, however, not a love tale; it is about the British in India around the 1920s - and conflicting feelings, questions, and mainly pain around the desired independence of the country. No, it does not contain fights, it is a depiction of a misunderstanding between a British woman and an Indian doctor, her claims of inappropriate behaviour and the situation's impact on the feelings of many of the characters. Forster, himself, did go to India and apparently had a lot of feelings about his nation's impact - an admirable trait. Just that admirable is how he stays realistic, albeit melancholic in his handling of the otherwise very sensitive topic. Almost all characters go through heartbreak but they don't feel overly dramatic, don't roll around on the ground to squeeze tears out of the readers, and yet... Suffering is there. Forster's minimalism and realism are presented through a beautiful, rather old-fashioned English. Yes, that might be my main reason for loving this book. Or, maybe it's the combination of all the things above. An empathetic writer cooking up his very own mixture of things and avoiding banal or lazy solutions. Forster was also in contact with Virginia Woolf, whom I love dearly and who wasn't afraid of wiping the floor with Forster - we only love a savage queen. As my Penguin classic edition shares in its introduction (written by Oliver Stallybrass) - and I must quote this, I find it so hilarious, Virginia Woolf concluded on Forster that:

'he spends his time in rowing old ladies upon the river, and is not able to get on his novel.'

Oh well, he did manage to finish his book at last, and I am very grateful for that. Once again, I hope to read A Room with a View this year.



Nr. 1. : Winner of the Year: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

And this is my lovely edition. It grew on my massively.
And this is my lovely edition. It grew on my massively.

Calvino was an Italian writer (born in 1923 - died 1985), a writer you can find a lot about (given that he has quite a few translated works and if you look up If on a Winter's Night a Traveler online, you'll soon find out how much of a cult book it is among book lovers.)


Besides the fact that this book has grown incredibly close to my heart due to, once again, personal reasons, I'm happy to announce that it is an excellent - and excellently (or rather puzzlingly) odd - book. It is seemingly written about books, where the protagonist is looking for a book, which allows Calvino to switch between book beginnings and an overarching story: every other chapter is told in second person (poor man, he just wants to get that damn book!), and we get to read very diversely with him: twelve different book-beginnings, to be exact. In no case do we get to reach (or even just near) the end of the whole novels. And hence, If on A winter's Night a Traveler is multiplied but also fragmented to an extent that will make you spin on your head.


It is rarely discussed (although I have heard it mentioned here and there before) that slowly, the story around the stories - the poor reader, being casually a simple you - descends into a dystopian reality too. None of these themes are permanent though, they are fleeting, episodic, serve only to arc between the book beginnings we get to read. It's easy to get lost and overwhelmed by Calvino's world, but it's also easy to lose sight of the themes that arc not just between the books in the books, but over the wholeness of the novel. Prisons, Japanese artists and desolate political landscapes take turns merrily, all of them fascinating for our protagonist, but none of them as fascinating as...


Ludmilla.


Because there is a woman involved, of course, a woman who is beautiful and who reads, and happens to be after the same book.


If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is famously a book about books, but it's also about linguistics, philosophy, religion, passion, a book that leaves itself, and writes its own - imaginary - writer into the story (very meta)... but also a book that at the end of the day is about.... love. Unpopular opinion, but I do believe that it is mainly about love and no, not about books. You don't believe me? Check out the last paragraph. A book likes to end on its main message. And on that, I would fight you.


And anyway, can't we all relate a bit when it comes to all being about love? Or at least all circling back to love? When we are after everything but love; career, success, money, but it finds us anyway and wipes the floor with our little fragile heart? Yeah. I thought so.




With all this - and much exhaustion on my side - I must conclude here my reading wrap-up for 2024. But I have great hopes for 2025! Let's see what it brings.


Stay safe. Mind your light.:)




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