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My year in books, 2024

The highs and lows of books completed

Jim Esch
12 min readDec 27, 2024

2024 was a late bloomer in terms of my reading life. It started slow, then after I left my full-time job and transitioned to home-based writing and teaching work, I settled into a steady groove.

I’ve been tracking books read for the last ten years. Numbers are not the most important metric by any means. Quality reading is always preferable to quantity. Still, quantitatively, this was my biggest reading year since 2017: 49 books completed. This signals to me that working from home is going to be very very good for my reading habit.

Photo by Ihor Malytskyi on Unsplash

Without further ado, here is a smattering of thumbnail thoughts about each book finished, followed by a list my favorite reads of the year.

The Future is Female 1, ed. Lisa Yaszek. This attractive hardcover edition of early SciFi by women authors is published by Library of America. I finished volume 1. Volume 1 takes you into the 1960’s. Volume 2, which I’m reading now, focuses on the late 1960’s and beyond. I should finish that one in early 2025. The mix of quality stories was inconsistent, but I enjoyed getting exposed to many new authors.

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery is a collection inside volume 1 of Ashbery’s poetry in Library of America. Ashbery continues to vex me. I admire little bits…

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