In the early years, I arbitrarily matched the number of top books to the number of the year (so I had 14 books on the list in 2014). I abandoned that practice after the first four years, and in 2022 I loosened the criteria even further and included almost anything that I gave four or five stars to. This year's recommendation list again has the largest number of books so far, at 100, out of the 114 full-length books I read in their entirety in 2024. I'll admit that I spent a couple of hours on the 31st of December finishing the last two to make an even hundred; also, the total includes some re-reads, two of which have appeared on previous Best of the Year lists. That's likely to start happening more often now that I've been doing this for so long, and I've decided just to add them to the list for both years in which I read them. Taking those duplicates into consideration, that means (if my calculations are correct) that the total number of recommendations across the 11 years is now 391.
The high total number for 2024 mainly reflects the fact that I've been commuting on the train, meaning I have several more hours of reading each week. There were another 22 books I started but didn't finish, something which I haven't counted in previous years. I'll mention below where I got some of them from.
The total also doesn't include a lot of manga read online, because that's hard to track and many of them are still in process.
Here are my figures in a table:
| 5 star | 4 star | 3 star | 2 star | Total | |
| 2024 | 8 | 92 | 13 | 0 | 114 |
| 2023 | 6 | 82 | 12 | 2 | 102 |
| 2022 | 6 | 59 | 13 | 4 | 82 |
| 2021 | 5 | 54 | 29 | 3 | 90 |
| 2020 | 8 | 53 | 21 | 0 | 82 |
| 2019 | 11 | 36 | 17 | 1 | 65 |
| 2018 | 5 | 72 | 15 | 2 | 94 |
| 2017 | 10 | 56 | 19 | 0 | 85 |
| 2016 | 11 | 53 | 12 | 1 | 77 |
| 2015 | 11 | 68 | 19 | 2 | 101 |
| 2014 | 9 | 70 | 23 | 2 | 104 |
| Total | 90 | 692 | 193 | 17 | 996 |
| Average | 8 | 63 | 18 | 2 | 90 |
The total happens to be very close to 1000 books for the 11 years I've been doing this. It also makes clear that, of the books I finish, fewer than 10% are worth five stars. About 70% are worth four stars, and about 20% three stars or below.
Tier Rankings
Since 2021, I have ranked the books in four tiers: Platinum (equal to 5 stars), and Gold, Silver and Bronze (which provide more gradation within the four-star space). Essentially, Bronze indicates that the storytelling and the emotional arc were sound and I enjoyed the book on the whole and recommend it to other readers, but with caveats, usually to do with poor copy editing and/or weak worldbuilding. Silver indicates a sound, solid book with no serious flaws, and Gold is a sound, solid book that also has something a bit extra, usually depth of characterization or insight into the human condition, but somehow or other doesn't quite make it all the way to Platinum. Platinum means I thoroughly enjoyed it, no significant flaws, depth, originality, an all-around winner. Significant issues in a book that's strong in other ways can knock it down one or even two tiers.I think I have become more generous, and I probably should be giving at least some of my three-star books two stars (a three-star book engaged me enough that I finished it, but had issues serious enough or numerous enough that I couldn't recommend it). I should probably also be demoting the Bronze books down to three stars. I haven't given one star in a long time. So, yes, grade inflation is happening with the star ratings, but hopefully my tier system makes up for it to some extent.
I also don't shy away, in my reviews, from mentioning (with examples) the ways in which I felt the book fell short. This definitely includes expecting some level of professionalism in the preparation of what is, after all, an article being offered for sale. I've been chided several times in comments on my Goodreads reviews for taking this line about books the commenters like, where my criticisms are for things that both the fans and, apparently, the author neither know nor care about, so I've become more careful recently about emphasizing that my review is, like all reviews, about my experience of the book, and other people may legitimately experience it differently.
Here's the link to all of my "Best of 2024" books, and here are my Platinum tier (8 books), Gold tier (9 books), Silver tier (43 books) and Bronze tier (40 books).
A note: I've figured out how to link to lists of books on Goodreads that have the same tag (or "shelf") and were read in the same year. I will take the risk of using these links, knowing that if GR revises their code - which is honestly long overdue - the links may well stop working. I will give brief rundowns on the Gold and Platinum books below.
Discovery/Sources
As with the previous two years, I read a lot of classics, mostly from Project Gutenberg. This is partly because my previous best sources, Netgalley and BookBub, have been increasingly disappointing over the past couple of years, featuring a lot of unimaginative cookie-cutter books, many of them in genres I don't care for, and even the ones I do pick up are often not ready for release, in my opinion. I read 36 books from Project Gutenberg: one, George MacDonald's Lilith, ranked in Platinum; three, all by Dorothy L. Sayers, in Gold; nine in Silver, and 18 in Bronze, with the remaining five books earning only three stars each. There were also three that I stopped reading before I finished them, which I haven't counted in the total of 36.In contrast, 16 of this year's books came from Netgalley, down from 20 in 2023, 25 in 2022 and 41 in the previous two years: only one Platinum (Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption), zero Gold, three Silver, seven Bronze, and five which earned only three stars. Because Netgalley books are pre-publication, I generally don't use my Needs Editing or Seriously Needs Editing tags on them, since at least in theory they could get more editing before publication (though, honestly, they most likely won't), but four of them were so significantly bad that I did tag them. Three of the three-star books got the Seriously Needs Editing tag, since they were in such a state that there was no chance that they wouldn't still need a lot of editing by their scheduled publication date; they were sometimes so inept as to be incomprehensible. Not all of these were by speakers of English as a second language, either.
In addition, I got 11 books from Netgalley that were either sufficiently bad or sufficiently not to my taste that I didn't finish them. I usually filter the books I pick up carefully, but on Netgalley (where I can't read a preview) I will take a risk on something that sounds like a fresh premise. Sometimes this works out; sometimes, as with these 11 books, it does not.
I bought only five through BookBub this year, down from six last year and 10 the year before, three tagged as "Needs Editing" and two, surprisingly, tagged "Well Edited"; three of them made Bronze and two Silver, so I'm getting better at filtering, apparently, since last year several of them didn't make the Best of the Year list at all. I'll say again: BookBub claim on their website, "We look for content that is well-formatted and free of typos and grammatical errors." They definitely do not do this.
I picked up at least another three or four books via BookBub that I didn't finish, only one of which I actually bought; the others I dropped after reading the sample.
I continued to make good use of the largest library system in the Southern Hemisphere (Auckland Libraries) this year. I read 27 ebooks from the library, more than twice as many as last year (though I didn't have a device that could borrow them until October of last year), and they consisted of three Platinum, two Gold, fifteen Silver, and five Bronze-tier books, plus a three-star. Not included in the total are two I abandoned before finishing them. I also borrowed 12 physical books from the library, mostly to complete my reading of the Lord Peter Wimsey series; there were four Gold, five Silver and three Bronze, so all of them made it to the recommendation list. In addition, I borrowed two e-audiobooks from the library, a Platinum and a Silver. That's a total of 43 library borrowings, with four Platinum, six Gold, 22 Silver, eight Bronze, a three-star and two not finished, an excellent haul on the whole.
I maintain a large wishlist (80-odd titles) on Amazon entitled "Await Ebook Price Drop," and monitor it regularly. I bought four books from my wishlist this year, two Silvers and two Bronzes. There don't seem to be as many books on sale lately, and when they do go on sale they're not always as good as I'd hoped. Two were well edited and one seriously needed editing; it was a LitRPG, which typically are poor in that respect.
I'm part of the Codex writers' forum, but I've hardly been on there this year. That's probably why I don't have any books by Codexians on this year's list.
I bought one book based on an Amazon recommendation, a well-edited Platinum-tier omnibus by Melissa McShane, an indie who reliably writes good books.
Best of the Best
I'll again just highlight the Platinum and Gold books this year, a total of 17 (up from 14 last year). Don't despise the Silver or even Bronze tiers, though; those are still recommendations, still books I enjoyed.Gold Tier
Let's start with the books I liked a lot but that didn't quite make it to the highest possible level. In alphabetical order by author (links to my Goodreads reviews):- Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree. I rarely enjoy a popular book as much as the hype machine tells me I should, but I enjoyed this cosy fantasy with a good amount of mystery and action and just the slightest touch of romance.
- Just Stab Me Now, Jill Bearup. I watched the YouTube shorts series that was the genesis of this book, and it was funny and engaging; the book, for me, is even better. It's a pity the author hates writing, because she's a lot better at it than most people.
- Emissary, Melissa McShane. McShane is reliably good without being (like, say, Lindsay Buroker) predictable or repetitious, and that's obvious even in this, her first book. It's like a much more light-hearted and faster-moving version of Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo series, with a mystery-solving duo who serve the God of Death.
The remaining Gold-tier books are all part of the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers. I've been reading a lot of classic mystery stories lately, and although that's out of my more usual genre (fantasy with occasional science fiction), it's not without precedent. As a child staying with my grandmother, I used to read her collection of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, but for whatever reason she didn't have the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, so I'd never read them until this year.
The books in the series I placed in Gold tier are, in publication order:
- Whose Body? The series starter, and it starts out strongly: a body in a bath, which is not (but resembles) the body of a man who's just gone missing. Troubled aristocrat Lord Peter has a personal connection, and investigates with skill and empathy.
- Unnatural Death. Did a sick woman die naturally, or was she helped along? And does Lord Peter's investigation do more harm than good?
- The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. An elderly general is found dead in his chair at Lord Peter's club. Exactly when he died has a great deal of bearing on an inheritance. Lord Peter, whose character is taking on a lot of layers by this point, has to weigh the interests of justice against "the done thing".
- Murder Must Advertise. Lord Peter goes undercover as an advertising copywriter, something the author worked at and hated, so the advertising industry comes in for considerable satire in the course of a fascinating mystery story.
- The Nine Tailors. The best parts of Sayers' books are often the parts that are not the mystery, and this is definitely an example of that, though the mystery itself is bizarre and complicated and difficult to unravel.
- Busman's Honeymoon. A collaboration between Wimsey and his new wife, and the last in the series by the original author (there are some continuation novels, which are mostly pretty good, but don't ever rise quite to the heights of the best ones by Sayers in my opinion). Funny, clever, and with a good deal of depth, it demonstrates that the usual approach of not continuing the story of a relationship past the wedding day is a missed opportunity.
Platinum Tier
And now, the best of the best of the best (a phrase that always makes me think of that scene in Men in Black), also in alphabetical order by author.- A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett. The first in this series made it into the Gold tier of my 2023 list, and this is even better. It's the more remarkable in that it's not, on the face of it, a book I should like at all - characters with serious personal issues in a dystopian, dank and bizarre biohacked empire, investigating gruesome crimes - but it's just so well done I had to put it in my top tier anyway.
- The Untold Story (The Invisible Library, #8), Genevieve Cogman. The final volume of a series which featured prominently on last year's list, this gives us a rip-roaring conclusion that provides emotional closure on all the complicated intersecting arcs without feeling the need to explain absolutely everything.
- The Mage War (Magebreakers, #5), Ben S. Dobson. Another strong series finisher, returning to the excellent form of the first book after what I felt were some slightly less successful middle books. Strongly noblebright and with an ensemble cast, two things I love.
- Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel, #2), T. Kingfisher. The first book featured in the Gold tier of my 2022 list. T. Kingfisher is perhaps the world's leading exponent of awkward romances between damaged middle-aged people in a world of swords and sorcery, and this is one, and a suspenseful, amusing, action-packed, emotionally intelligent one at that.
- Lilith, a Romance, George MacDonald. This was a re-read from I don't remember how many years ago; it's profound in a way that "spiritual" books rarely are today, and also a great work of fantasy from the 19th century that influenced Tolkien and, especially, Lewis.
- The Smoke-Scented Girl, Melissa McShane. Another re-read, this time from 2019, when I placed it second on my ranked list of recommendations. I was re-reading it in order to move on to the sequel, The God-Touched Man, which I didn't rate as highly (it only made the Silver tier), but is still a good book. This one is action-packed, but not at the expense of depth of character or worldbuilding.
- The Complete Convergence Trilogy, Melissa McShane. Technically a partial re-read, since I'd read the first book in 2017. It got an honourable mention in that year's list, probably equivalent to at least a Silver-tier ranking in my current system, though I noted that the diary conceit led to inconsistent pacing and that there wasn't enough character depth for a really high rating. Well, the characters get deeper as the trilogy proceeds, and the diary style settles down and becomes a feature more than a fault, and there's plenty of action, romance, reflection, politics, magic, and just sound craft.
- Tress of the Emerald Sea, Brandon Sanderson. I often give Sanderson's beautifully crafted, brilliantly imaginative, excellently edited books five stars, and if I was still ranking books in order, this one would get the top spot for 2024. The protagonist is 100% the kind of protagonist I particularly enjoy (a pragmatic, capable, sensible, courageous, intelligent and creative young woman who's also kind and genuinely good-hearted), and the journey she takes is suspenseful, exciting, amusing and fun.
Conclusion
With Netgalley and BookBub no longer providing a reliable supply of good new fantasy fiction, I've branched out a bit from the narrow focus of most of my earlier lists and read a lot more classics, a change that started in 2023. But thanks largely to the library, I've also read a lot of good recent fiction. Along the way, I've seen some serious stinkers that I didn't consider met the most basic standard of professionalism, but that, in at least some cases, other people did enjoy. Enjoyment of books is a subjective thing, and even though I try to give reasoning for my preferences and ratings, other people's mileage will inevitably vary, since they give different weightings to the factors I consider and may well like elements I don't like, and vice versa. That's exactly why I give details of what did and didn't work for me; the thing that ruined the book for me may be your favourite thing ever, or something you don't care about in the slightest, or don't even notice.Still, if your taste is even approximately like mine, here's another year's worth of reading recommendations which ought to yield something you'll enjoy. I will note that one of my last year's Platinum picks, Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time, won a Goodreads Choice Award in its genre (science fiction) in 2024, and both Bookshops and Bonedust and Tress of the Emerald Sea were nominated in 2023, so my taste isn't completely outside the mainstream - even if a previous Goodreads Choice Award winner and another nominee were the recipients of my "Most Disappointing Book of the Year" awards in their respective years.
I look forward to more good reading in 2025.
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