It’s the beginning of the year, which means it’s time for my yearly round up of the books I’ve read. I was surprised how many books I read I’d read last year, 275. Which is a nice total. But this year, I topped that. Which is kind of crazy. But as usual, it’s not all novels, there are a healthy amount of comics in that total as well.
As always, you can find my reading log on Goodreads. My reading goal for 2024 was 250. And according to Goodreads, I finished out the year with 344 books. Again, I smashed all my previous reading totals. I’m waiting for this surge to end. Watch, next year I’ll only read like 100 books. LOL
Let’s take a look at some of the GoodReads stats for 2024.
I’m pretty happy with what I was able to read this year. Like last year, I think I’m comic book heavy in my overall totals. I may focus more on novels this year. There was a big stretch last year where I read all two years worth of John Byrne’s Superman comics. So that definitely inflated my totals quite a bit.
Let’s look at the numbers of some of the things I read.
Looking at my list it looks like I read about 61 novels this year. And everything else was comic books. You can see the shortest thing I read all year was a short story. It’s a part of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, which I’m quite enjoying. I’m looking forward to the upcoming series for that. The longest book I read was the second Gray Man novel, On Target. So far, that Gray Man series is really good. I’m hoping they make more movies with Ryan Gosling based on the books.
These are the “most popular” and “least popular” books I read this year. It looks like Lord of the Flies was the one I read shelved by more people than any other. That’s still a good book, I hadn’t read it since high school. I had read the book FantasticLand right before it, and it reminded me of Lord of the Flies. So I re-read it right after. Still really good and you can see where it’s influenced so many other things. That issue of Tom King’s Wonder Woman looks like no one else had shelved it, which is not surprising, it’s a fairly new issue.
Okay, let’s dig into my list of favorite books I read in 2024. Rules are the same every year. Only books/comics I read for the first time in 2024 are eligible for this list. No re-reads, of which I typically had a few. I don’t usually read brand new stuff the year it comes out, but it happens.
Here are the top 5 books I read last year in no particular order. Images and links are from GoodReads pages.
Books
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes – Back in 2023 I read Madeline Miller’s books; Circe and Song of Achilles. They made my 2023 favorites list. They made me want to read more modern retellings of mythology. Which, because of Madeline Miller, there are a lot of now. So from there I read a book this year called God of Fire. And I *did not* like it. Most of it was okay, but the way it handled the protagonist, Hephaestus, really grated on my nerves. Then Michael May recommended to me Stone Blind. And *this* one was exactly what I wanted. Modern retellings of mythology that are fun and interesting. This revolves mostly around the Medusa/Perseus myths, but you get a good grab bag of a lot of the stories. And they are written well. I really enjoyed what it was doing and how it got there.
Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells – I read the first book in this series back in April 2023. It did not make my favorites list. I liked it, I thought it was good, but not great. Consequently, I didn’t read the second book in the series until last year. Early last year. And I loved it. I think I just liked the overall story in this one better. Plus, the book introduced a ship run by an AI called ART. And ART was awesome and I loved his relationship with the main character. I wanted every book after this to be ART and Murderbot’s adventures into space. It’s kind of hard to describe this series, but Murderbot is a security robot that hacked its governor module and gave himself free will. Now all he wants to do is watch his downloaded media and be left alone. But instead he’s constantly pulled into drama with humans and having to save them when they inevitably put themselves into situations that will cause their immediate grisly deaths. I’ve read up through book 4 and hope to read book 5 very soon. For those that didn’t know, this book series is going to be an AppleTV+ series some time this year.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi – I’ve been interested in Scalzi for years. I had eyeballed his Redshirts for years to read. And I want to read his Old Man’s War this year, too. The only thing I’ve read by him (besides this book) is Kaiju Preservation Society, which I enjoyed quite a bit. This one I liked even better than KPS. A guy from a wealthy family is sort of the black sheep. He’s a step sibling, as his mother was different, and none of his siblings like him. One day a mysterious uncle on his mother’s side dies and leaves him his business. And the novel is spent learning about what this uncle did. And what the uncle did is kind of weird and hard to explain, but he’s somewhat like a Bond villain. And the guy has inherited this entire empire. It’s a really great world. Lots of great characters. It really has fun with the concept. I don’t want to get too much into it because the discovery of the world is the best part.
FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven – I think I read a review of this somewhere, and it got me interested. It’s about a hurricane that floods the surrounding area of an amusement park similar to Disney World, trapping hundreds of park goers and staff inside the park for a month. That’s interesting enough, but what this book does isn’t show you the events happening in real time. The story in the book takes place years after the event. It’s interviewing different people that were involved in the events and slowly reveals all the craziness that happened in the park. It’s a fascinating “oral history” of these events. I really really dug this book. It reminded me a lot of Lord of the Flies, and I went on a strange Lord of the Flies kick after reading this. I re-read the book and even watched the 1990 movie with Balthazar Getty and James Badge Dale.
James by Percival Everett – I’m a fan of Mark Twain. And I’m a fan of Tom and Huck Finn. I read both of those books in high school, and just a few years ago, I re-read both books and they hold up as good reads, especially Huck Finn. I even read the two novellas that Twain wrote as follow-ups; Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Tom Sawyer Detective. So when I saw someone had written a book that was essentially “The Adventures of Huck Finn but from Jim’s point of view”, I knew I had to read it. And it was exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s a lot funnier than I was expecting. Also, yes, there’s a lot of heavy themes most of them pertaining to slavery and how whites treated blacks. But also, Jim is really awesome as a character. And you see the events of Huck Finn just from a different angle. I love that. The end of this book though, kind of goes its own way, but in a good way, I think. It’s really good. I highly recommend it.
Together Forever: The Run-DMC and Beastie Boys Photographs – Yes! I’m sticking in a sixth book! This isn’t a novel, it’s a coffee table book. And it’s a collection of photographs of the rap groups Run-DMC and Beastie Boys; two of my favorite groups of all time. They used to tour together and hang out and did promotional stuff all the time. These are all the photos they did together. It’s a gorgeous edition. Lots of really awesome photos, the majority of which were in the 80s. I really really love this book.
Let’s switch over to comics! Here are the top 5 comics I read last year in no particular order.
Comics
Strange/Doctor Strange by Jed Mackay and Pascal Ferry, and various – I guess, if I HAD to pick a favorite comic of the year, it would be the epic run Jed Mackay had across the Doctor Strange titles. First with Strange, where Clea takes over as sorcerer supreme after Strange’s death, and then in Doctor Strange which has Strange return from the dead to join Clea. Mackay writes Clea as awesome and badass and funny. And I love her and Stephen’s relationship. They fully support each other and they have fun banter like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. I also read MacKay’s lead up event to this; The Death of Dr Strange. The main issues of that are really good as well, but these two titles are…*chef’s kiss*
Black Cat by Jed MacKay and various artists – Yep, I’m doubling down on Mr MacKay. MacKay’s run is made up of two different series, but they all kind of go together. I read the first series back in 2022. I finished out the series in 2024. I also read several one shots and minis that MacKay wrote for Black Cat after the series ended. They are all really funny. Particularly the run I read this past year where Black Cat and the Silver Fox face the God of Death and bargain with him. So much adventure, fun, and snappy banter. This is a great series. Felicia even manages to steal her own version of Iron Man’s armor from Tony Stark. GREAT!
Birds of Prey by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero – Let’s switch over to DC Comics. Kelly Thompson has been a favorite of mine since she did Black Widow, Kate Bishop: Hawkeye, and West Coast Avengers several years ago. So when I heard she was going to take over the super girl group, Birds of Prey, I was pretty excited. And come to find out, I was correct. This title is AWESOME. It has a great set of characters, they have great and fun interactions, and the story plots are wild, adventurous, and really have fun with the concept. That’s all I want out of things. Just write like you enjoy the characters. Kelly Thompson does that and this title exemplifies that.
Wonder Woman by Tom King and Daniel Sampere – So I read several events by both Marvel and DC this past year. One of them was DC’s Absolute Power by Mark Waid, which was really good. But the best thing that this event did for me was introduce me to Tom King’s Wonder Woman. I read a bunch of the Absolute Power tie-ins. I’ll be honest, most of the one-off titles were garbage. But several of the in-title crossovers were good with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Particularly Wonder Woman, which was written by Tom King. Who for the most part I like, but sometimes he can’t get out of his own way. I love King’s Vision series and the beginning of his Batman run. But his Miracle Man title was WAY too convoluted. So I gave his Wonder Woman a try based on the Absolute Power crossover issues. And I loved it. This is such a great title. King does a great job respecting the character. He ties in Trinity and the other Amazons. The story structure is a little weird. We are introduced to a new villain called The Sovereign. The whole story is told by him in flashback AFTER the events have happened. So while I’m side-eyeing King’s decision to have Wonder Woman’s story told to us in flashback by a guy, a guy villain nonetheless, I will say, that construct does manage to get out of the way of the story and be as non-intrusive as possible. And the actual story that is being told is EXCELLENT. You really see how awesome and bad ass Wonder Woman is. I also want to point out that King also writes a backup story in each issue that takes place in the future involving the antics of Trinity, Damien Wayne, and Jon Kent. It’s funny and lighthearted. It’s supposed to be less serious. And it’s a wonderful companion to the main story. I love this title so much.
John Byrne’s 2 year run on Superman/Action Comics – I’ve talked about on this very blog how much I love Byrne’s run on Superman back in the late 80s. For two years he wrote and drew Superman and Action Comics. And towards the end, he was also writing Adventures of Superman. I was buying his run piece-meal from the racks in the 80s and loved it. So I decided in 2024 to read the complete 2 year run of Byrne’s Superman which includes the main Superman title, Action Comics, the mini-event Legends, the graphic novel The Earth Stealers, several issues of Adventures of Superman, and several issues of Legion of Superheroes that tied into his run. It was one long glorious ride. Not everything was my favorite, I’ll say that. But over the two years, particularly in the first year or so, there was some dynamite storytelling. And Byrne’s art. I love Byrne’s art. It’s just so well composed and lends itself to the action-y stories.
And there you go, some of my favorite things I read in 2024. I read some really fun stuff last year. It was difficult to narrow it down, but only for 1 or 2 things. Most of this stuff jumped out immediately as “this belongs on the list”.
Hope you guys found something new to read that you may eventually love. Let me know if you do!
So that covers the year end articles for IRM, and now the things I’ve read. Next up…MOVIES!! I need to rewatch a few things, so movies may be another week or two down the line. But I’ll get them out, I promise you!!
Thanks for reading.
Cavalcade of Awesome 