Last year I set myself a rather exhausting target of reading 100 books. I made it, but with working and parenting and writing that was sort of a stretch. This year, I didn’t set a target–instead I just read. A lot. Without worrying about how many. I tracked everything in GoodReads, and even reviewed a good percentage of them.

Grand total for the year was 85 books, including:

• 5 nonfiction – of which Eve was my favorite, followed closely by Travelers to Unimaginable Lands
• 3 memoirs – hard to beat Crying at HMart in this category
• 3 poetry – Ted Hughes Tales from Ovid was the best here
• 34 general fiction – so many good choices, many of which are below, but one overall winner for the year from this category
• 10 sci fi – so many great options this year. Standouts are, of course, murderbot, which I’m a latecomer to but adore, and Cat Rambo’s newest, Devil’s Gun
• 15 fantasy – honestly, the whole Last Binding series by Freya Marske is top of this category for me. I adored all three of them.
• 12 YA – late in the year top of this category was I Hope You’re Listening, by Tom Ryan.
• 2 series — almost all of Murderbot, and the Last Binding series

Of these, I ended up giving a whopping 30 five stars, so either I made good choices this year, or I was unusually happy when rating things.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my five star reads:

And here are my top ten:

And my favorite book of the year is this:

It’s a masterpiece, one of those books that I was sad to finish because I just wanted to experience it again, fresh, unread and ahead of me. Beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, warm. If you haven’t read this, please consider doing so.

Happy reading in 2024!