🏆 2024 Reading Faves & Flops
Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book.
Amelia Hruby:Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading, a podcast about, quite simply, the pleasure of reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And on this show, I share curated book lists, reflections on my reading practices, and soon some conversations with special book loving friends. Today, I am coming to you again in that beautiful end of year portal between Christmas and New Year's. This is always the week of the year where I find myself clearing out my cues.
Amelia Hruby:I am looking back at all of the books I've read, the films I've watched, the shows I've enjoyed over the course of the year. I'm looking at everything I've saved to watch or read for later, and I'm just kind of letting it all go, trying to reflect on what went well, what did I enjoy, what did I not enjoy this year, and what have I maybe been holding on to on some lists that I can just release and take off of my TBR. I also like to practice something I call library book bankruptcy at the end of the year, which is where I return every single book I have checked out from the library, regardless of whether I have read it or not. I just take them all back and I let the library have them. And then I can always check them out again if I so desire, but that, like, literal clearing of the shelves helps with my metaphorical clearing of the shelves and helps me better reflect on the reading I have done for the year and how I might want to shift things in the year ahead.
Amelia Hruby:So this episode is also a part of that reflection process for me this year. And over the next 20 minutes or so, I will be sharing my 2024 reading faves and reading flops. So to do that, I'm gonna tell you about 4 books I read this year that I loved. These range from backlist classics to brand new releases, and they span different types of literature. I've got a poetry book, a nonfiction book, a romance, and a horror book that I will be talking about.
Amelia Hruby:These are 4 faves that I haven't really talked about in episodes of the podcast, except my episode where I reviewed every single book I read this year, and I'm excited to share a little bit more about them and why I loved them in this episode. And then I'm gonna share 4 reading flops from 2024. And these are going to be specific books. They're actually gonna be different things I tried out to kind of, like, stimulate my reading and make it more exciting and interesting for me that all just, like, didn't really work. Or in some cases, there are things that I wanted to do that I failed to do this year.
Amelia Hruby:And so after I share 4 of my favorite books of the year, I will share those 4 reading flops, and that will be today's episode. So let's go ahead and dive in. Let me tell you about 4 of my favorite reads from 2024. The first book on this list is the only poetry book that I read in full this year. I often will grab a book of poetry off my shelf and turn to a page and read whatever arrives, or I will go out searching for a specific poem, and I will find it in a moment where I feel like I need that comfort or confrontation or solace or surrender, whatever that poem might be bringing me.
Amelia Hruby:But this year, Joy Sullivan released her collection, Instructions for Traveling West, and I knew that I needed to read it immediately. This is her debut collection, and as the synopsis will tell you, it examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. This is definitely a book that embraces fresh starts. It embraces the grief of kind of uprooting yourself from the life that you've been living and going out in search of a new one and all of the exquisite joy and pain that we find along the way. This book definitely reminded me of the many times I've uprooted my life and it just felt so personal and I think that the best poetry always reminds us that the personal is universal and that the things that we think only we have ever gone through are precisely the details of our lives that might resonate with the most people.
Amelia Hruby:And so I wanna read a poem from this collection just so you can get a taste of the magic. I have to tell you, I have dog eared at least 15 of the poems here as I'm flipping back through, but I'm gonna read you a short one called why read poetry if it won't make you rich. For starters, your soul will get bigger, your love more terrible and luminous. Soon, you'll say tender things at parties after too much champagne. A sidewalk quince wet with midnight will stop you in your tracks.
Amelia Hruby:In time, you'll find the perfect metaphor for your child's face. All at once, you'll see the world and want it again. Clothes flapping on the line, lilacs strewn in seeding, the luck of worms. An artichoke with its heart torn hot and steaming from the throbbing crown will suddenly turn you on. So that was Why Read Poetry If It Won't Make You Rich by Joy Sullivan from her collection Instructions for Traveling West, which I read and loved in 2024.
Amelia Hruby:My next favorite from this year was Bodywork by Melissa Febos. So this is the nonfiction pick on this list and it is a collection of essays where Melissa Febos reflects on the craft of writing. So as the synopsis says, I'll just read you a sentence or 2 from the back, following her own personal path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor, Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life in a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy and the power of divulgence. This book opens with what I think may be the most powerful essay I've ever read about writing and being inspired by our lives in our writing. That essay is called In Praise of Naval Gazing, and it dives deep into this belief that honest self appraisal requires bravery and makes us, I think, better people.
Amelia Hruby:I definitely can't summarize this essay in just a few moments here. You'll really have to go get a copy of Bodywork to read it yourself, but I would love to share one paragraph with you from the very end. There Melissa Febos writes, transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that's what I tell my students.
Amelia Hruby:We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other. Just so beautiful and so wise. The subtitle of this book is The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. And if you are a writer or you desire to be 1, I think that Bodywork by Melissa Febos is a must read book.
Amelia Hruby:Up next, I will share my favorite romance of the year, which was The Pairing by Casey McQuiston. This might have been the only book I read this year where I immediately, after finishing it, texted no fewer than 5 friends to be like, you have to read this book. I went and bought it at Target the day it came out because I had a dentist appointment and I got to the dentist really early and my dentist is next to a Target. And I was like, I need to go get this book. I'll just walk over there and get it, while I'm waiting for the dentist to see me.
Amelia Hruby:So I walked over, I got the book, I started reading it, I took a picture of it in the dentist's office, and sent it to a few friends already after, like, the first chapter. And then by the time I finished it, I texted many more friends to be like, this is my favorite read of the year. You have to read it right now. The premise of this book is a little funny. Let me read you what it says on the back.
Amelia Hruby:Theo and Kit have been a lot of things. Childhood best friends, crushes, lovers, and now estranged exes. After a brutal breakup on a flight to their dream European food and wine tour, they exited each other's lives. Time apart has done them good. Theo is a bartender in an aspiring sommelier with a long roster of lovers.
Amelia Hruby:Kit graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened. 4 years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip solo separately. It's not until Theo and Kit board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for 3 weeks of the most romantic sights and sensuous flavors of France, Spain, and Italy. But it'll be fine as long as they agree they're absolutely over each other.
Amelia Hruby:So when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is game. In fact, why stop there? Why not a full on European hookup competition? But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have. And what they can't have is each other.
Amelia Hruby:This premise, this, like, hookup competition premise, when I saw it originally, I was like, I am not gonna be into that. No, thanks. Like, not for me. European food tour, it's been done. I'm not interested.
Amelia Hruby:But the way that Casey McQuiston writes queer community and queer relationships always has me just, like, eating out of the palm of her hands. Like, I love the characters she writes. I love how they interact with each other. I love the conflict that they have. I love how they express themselves and step into their identities over the course of the book.
Amelia Hruby:In this book specifically, I also loved all the descriptions of the food and the cities. It was so lush both with the location and with the personal relationships, and I just, like, couldn't say better things about it. It got generally panned across BookTube and the online reviews that I have seen, but I couldn't disagree more. I love this book and I highly, highly recommend The Pairing by Casey McQuiston. And finally, my 4th fave of the year was Come Closer by Sarah Gran.
Amelia Hruby:So this short horror novella was originally published in 2003, and there was a 20th anniversary edition put out in 2023. And I just happened to pick it up at The Strand when I was in New York City last winter, and I read it tucked into my bed at the beginning of the year in one sitting. Like, I got in bed in the evening, I had this book with me, and I stayed up until I was finished reading it, and then I could not sleep all night because it thoroughly creeped me out in less than a 150 pages. So the overall premise of this book is that we have a main character and this woman has these impulses that she can't control. She, like, sends a memo to her boss that had all these insults in it.
Amelia Hruby:She's been shoplifting. She gets in fights. She's hearing this weird noise in her apartment. There's this voice in her head. And so she starts to wonder if she's being possessed.
Amelia Hruby:The very first page of the book is actually this quiz, are you possessed by a demon? Which I thought was really fun and brought a little, like, multimedia splash into it. And Amanda, the main character, she's a successful architect. She's in a happy marriage. She's like, there has to be a reasonable explanation for this.
Amelia Hruby:But by the end of the book, we're really questioning whether it's all in her head or whether something has possessed her. I thought that this was such a beautifully written and propulsively paced book, and it really invites us, I think, to ask ourselves as readers, like, how would we know if we were losing our mind, and how would we know if something was happening in our psyche or happening to us from the outside world? So I really enjoyed Come Closer by Sarah Gran, and that is my 4th favorite of the year. So to recap the first half of this episode, my 4 faves in 2024 were Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan, Bodywork by Melissa Febos, The Pairing by Casey McQuiston, and Come Closer by Sarah Gran. Now I had many other favorite reads this year, but I wanted to pick 4 that I loved enough that I bought physical copies of them and I will never let them leave my bookshelves because I want to return to them again and again.
Amelia Hruby:And many, many, many of the books I enjoyed this year were library loans. They were things that felt very of the moment, either in my personal life or in the sort of cultural zeitgeist. And I just think these 4 are really gonna stick with me and they're ones that I personally loved. And if you read them, I would love to know if you love them too. So those are my 2024 faves.
Amelia Hruby:Now, let's do a little transition and we will talk about my flops. At the beginning of 2024, I decided that reading was going to be one of my highest priorities for the year. So I actually wrote a list of priorities on a whiteboard in my room, and they have, you know, they're various things. 1 of them is, like, growing my podcast. 1 of them is saving money to buy my house.
Amelia Hruby:1 of them has to do with how I run my business. But I wanted one that just felt, like, personal and fun, and that one was read books. Not even read more books, just read books. So I started the year with, like, a really fun and silly reading challenge. I don't even know if I should call it that.
Amelia Hruby:Basically, at the beginning of 2024, I decided that I was going to read by color because I track my reading in this app called Literal. And Literal makes this, like, beautiful little chart of all of the covers of the books that you've read, and it's 6 books across, like 6 books per line. So I decided I was gonna read books by color, so 6 books with a cover of the same color. So I started the year with pink, red, orange covers, and then I did a series of black covers with red accents. Then I did sort of purple brown mauve covers with yellow text, then I did a bunch of blue covers, then I did all teal covers, then I did black covers, and then I did yellow covers.
Amelia Hruby:So I did a lot of bicolor reading to start the year, and it looks beautiful on my little reading roundup in literal for the year, but it was definitely a flop for my overall reading. Because if I wanted to read a particular book, I had to suddenly find 5 other books that had a cover of the same color. And, also, I didn't really think about the fact that books are published with, like, many different covers. There's typically a different cover in the UK. Or if there's a European release, there's often a different cover for a hardcover paperback release.
Amelia Hruby:So sometimes I'd go, like, have a book in mind and I go look it up on literal and the cover would be a totally different color. And then I'd have to go figure out how to get this other edition on there so that the covers would match. And after a few months of this, it just really felt like reading by color was holding me back. So I forced myself to stop, which was actually also kind of hard. I can get a little compulsive in my reading habits.
Amelia Hruby:So I had to make myself read some things with different colors to kind of break this habit, and I have officially abandoned reading by color now and in the future. Another reading flop for me this year was finishing series that I have read. So I am not the queen of the DNF. I really struggle not to finish a book that I have started, and I learned this year that I really struggle not to finish a series that I have started. So if I start a series, I'm gonna wanna read all the books and the novellas and the bonuses.
Amelia Hruby:Like, I have this really strong completionist streak in me, and sometimes that works out just fine. Like, the first series I really went into this year was the Fable series by Adrienne Young. I read Fable and namesake and the 2 follow-up novellas, Drift and the Last Legacy and the prequel saint, and I liked all of them. I thought they were great. That was, like, a great series reading experience for me.
Amelia Hruby:In contrast, the next series I read was the Indigo Court series by Yasmine Gellhorn, which starts with the book night mist. And I liked night mist, but by the time I got to, like, the 3rd book, I was like, oh, I am struggling here, and I kept reading for 2 more books. It's like I had to finish it, but I'm just not really sure what that did for me other than take up a bunch of my time reading stuff so I'd sort of know how the series ended. I think that, overall, like, some series are great, and I enjoy them, but I'm really want to break up with this part of me that feels like I have to finish a series to know how it ends. And I really got challenged by that at the end of this year as I was reading the Atlas 6 series because I loved the book, the Atlas 6, but I thought the follow-up was okay, and then the 3rd book in that series was just finishable to me.
Amelia Hruby:So I actually did quit reading the series. I quit reading the 3rd book. I stopped, and I have no intention of picking it back up. Now with that one, I was able to do some Reddit sleuthing and figure out how the series ends. So I got that sense of completion of this is how it went, and I know how the story ended even though I didn't read the whole book.
Amelia Hruby:But other series I've read, like, they aren't online. You can't look up the ending. So I have to work on my, sort of, I guess, like, failure tolerance with not finishing a book. It's not really a failure. That's not what I mean.
Amelia Hruby:But just more like if I opt out of the rest of the series, I just have to be okay with it being open ended. And I think that it will serve me well to work on that. So my second flop of the year was finishing series, and I'm gonna try not to finish all the series I start in 2025. My third reading flop of the year was an intention I set that I did not live up to. So my first two reading flops were, like, things I did that didn't go well for me.
Amelia Hruby:These next 2 are things that I wanted to do and did not quite succeed at. So this year, I really wanted to read more of the books that I own or what some people call, like, my physical TBR. These are books that I have purchased. They live in my house with me, and I have not read them. Now I, in fact, actually bought a second bookshelf this year.
Amelia Hruby:Maybe it was, like, the end of 2023 to put all of the physical books I own and have not read on. So I have a whole bookshelf full of these books, and this year, I read so few of them. Basically, if I bought a book and I didn't read it right away, it just went on the shelf, and I did not pick it back up. And so I really thought I was gonna read more books off my physical TBR this year, and I did not. And I think a big reason for that is that I got obsessed with going to the library this year.
Amelia Hruby:I went to my local library branch at least once a week, and I always had holds that I had requested to go pick up, then I'd look at the shelves and pick something else up. And I think that the due date of having to return the library books by a certain time, sort of, like, in my mind, gave me this added motivation to read the library books that didn't exist for the books on my shelf. There's actually this part of me that's like, well, if I just buy the book, then I could read it anytime, and I no longer feel this pressure to read it, and then I just don't. So I don't really love this. Like, I I love the library.
Amelia Hruby:The library is a wonderful, beautiful place, but I would like to read more of the books that are in my house. And if I'm not going to read them, I would like to let them leave the house. So I have some thoughts for how I'm gonna do this in 2025, and I'm recording a little episode about that coming up next. So you'll hear more about how I plan to read the books I own and clear off my physical TBR in the year ahead coming soon. And then my 4th flop of the year was finding 5 star reads.
Amelia Hruby:I really wanted to enjoy more of the books I read this year, but I think I kind of left that as, like, a really vague intention, and I didn't think about what it would take to find 5 star reads or what a 5 star read even means to me. So when I look back at my year of reading, I did not rate very many books 5 stars. In fact, of the 150 books that I read this year, I only gave 12 books a 5 star rating. So less than 10% of the books got a 5 star rating. And looking back through, like, not even all of those books, I feel, like, totally positive deserve a 5 star at this point.
Amelia Hruby:But I just do my ratings as soon as I finish the book, so it's that immediate impression I have upon finishing. So I guess I got some good 5 star reads this year, but I also feel like a lot of those books were series, and they weren't even really books I would recommend to other people, which for me, I think the flavor of a 5 star read is that book that I read and I can't stop raving about. And I think it's just so good. And it doesn't have to be for everyone, but it's for, like, a specific person or for me. I'm the specific person.
Amelia Hruby:But also, like, specific people I know. And I immediately want to, like, take it to them and press it into their hands and be like, please read this. Like, that is the feeling I want more of always in my reading, and I did not feel that very much in 2024. So this was kind of a reading flop for me, and I actually think at the root of it, the actual flop was that I read a 150 books this year. While I didn't set a goal to, like, read more books, I think that just, like, prioritizing reading made me feel like I should always be reading something.
Amelia Hruby:And as soon as I felt like a book was slowing me down, I would put it aside. But I think a lot of the most meaningful books I have read are books that I have to make time for, that I have to give space to. And what happened is that I was just trying to keep up this kind of propulsive pace, and that led me to read a lot of romance and a lot of pretty, like, pulpy thrillers, which I love, but which are rarely more than 3 star reads for me. Because part of the ease of reading them is, like, I know the tropes. I know how this works, so I can get through it really quickly.
Amelia Hruby:Like, it's not necessarily doing anything that challenges me or makes me slow down or makes me think. So that was definitely a challenge or a flop for my reading year, was just like reading a 150 books and how few of them felt like 5 star reads for me. So to recap, the 4 flops of my reading year were reading by color, that did not work, finishing series I started, that was not always a great idea, reading from my physical TBR or the books I own that live on the bookshelves in my house, did not really happen, and finding 5 star reads did not really happen probably because I read too many books this year. Thinking about these reading flops, I have come up with some plans for my reading for 2025 that I hope will help with this, particularly help with reading the books on the shelves in my house and with finding more 5 star reads. And I will be talking about those in our next episode.
Amelia Hruby:So stay tuned to learn more about my 2025 TBR and reading plans. And until then, here's to your next best book.