Review of the year 2024

Bookhound's bookish review of the year.

115 books read including 23 re-reads, 2 books of poetry, 15 non-fiction works, and 16 in translation. Split roughly 66/33% paper to kindle (Kindle was a life saver when I was ill and living away from home).

Favourite fiction book of the year - Bleak House / Charles Dickens.

Favourite non-fiction - Every valley / Charles King.

Most unexpected book/s to make an impression - Fredrik Backman's Beartown trilogy, which helped me through a bad patch health wise, and The cat who saved books / Sosuke Natsukawa, which introduced me to the weird world of Japanese cat fiction (yes, it really exists). It's surprisingly delightful.

Best re-read. Quite a few but especially A month in the country / J.L. Carr, Demons / Dostoevsky, and We couldn't leave Dinah / Mary Treadgold (a childhood favourite that I rediscovered)

Disappointments - Patrick Leigh Fermor's letters (though I loved A time to keep silence). Found A terrible kindness by Jo Browning Wroe problematic too, though know that others loved it. Ditto Geneva by Richard Armstrong which started brilliantly, and then went plain peculiar.

Honourable mentions to Peter Levi's The light garden of the angel king. A beautiful description of how Afghanistan should be without the turmoil that surrounds it, and Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon - just reading it feels like being in Paris.

Most unusual read was Hiding the elephant by Jim Steinmeyer, an appropriately enchanting history of magical illusions.

Here's to 2025.