My 2024 reading year

Now that we have both feet in the new year, I thought I would look back over my reading for last year. It was a busy enough schedule, as the works listed below do not include book chapters or articles read for academic purposes. 

While I was working on my PhD and for a long period afterwards, I read almost no 'serious' books for pleasure, but I have been gradually reclaiming ground over the past few years and am happy that I finally seem to have hit my stride again as a reader in 2024.

Some of these books were read for reviewing purposes anyway, but I plan to write mini-reviews of as many as possible as an excercise in concision and brevity. I will post these intermittently, but for the moment, here is the bare list—if not from A to Z, then at least from Ambler to Woolf.

The Mask of Dimitrios. Eric Ambler 1939; 2009 repr. Penguin.

The Schirmer Inheritance. Eric Ambler 1953; 1967 repr. Fontana.

Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Vol. 1. Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan 2022. Academia Lunace. Luna Press.

Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Brian Attebery 2014. Oxford University Press.

The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts. Delyth Badder and Mark Norman 2023. Cardiff: Calon.

The Butterfly Disjunct and Other Stories. Stewart C. Baker 2024. Interstellar Flight Press.

The Complete Dramatic Works. Samuel Beckett 1990. London: Faber & Faber.

Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury 1953; 2013 repr. Simon & Schuster.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. Alan Bradley 2010.  Random House.

The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov 1967. Translated by Richard Pevear. 2000 repr. Penguin.

The Saint of Bright Doors. Vajra Chandrasekera 2023. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

Pardon This Intrusion. John Clute 2016. SF Gateway.

Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst (eds.) 2023. Liverpool: Dead Ink.

The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales. Arthur Conan Doyle 1883; digital vers. Project Gutenberg.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Umberto Eco 1994; 2004 repr. Harvard Univ. Press.

The South Westerlies. Jane Fraser 2019. Cromer: Salt Publishing.

Little Egypt. Lesley Glaister 2014. Cromer: Salt Publishing.

Averno. Louise Glück 2006. London: Penguin Books.

Faithful and Virtuous Night. Louise Glück 2014; 2015 repr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Murder in the Manor. Fiona Grace 2019

Death and a Dog. Fiona Grace 2019

Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis. Verne S. Harris 2021.  Routledge.

The Centauri Device. M. JohnHarrison 1975; 2020 repr. Millennium.

Of Ochre and Ash. Eleanor Hooker 2021. Dublin: Dedalus Press.

The Twist of a Knife. Anthony Horowitz 2022; 2023 repr. Penguin.

The Lottery and Other Stories. Shirley Jackson 1949; 2009 repr. Penguin.

Antarctica. Claire Keegan 1999; 2023 repr. Faber & Faber.

You Should Have Left. Daniel Kehlmann 2016; Translated by Ross Benjamin. 2017 repr. Riverrun.

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Louise Kennedy 2021; 2022 repr. Bloomsbury.

Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R. F. Kuang 2022. New York: Harper Voyager.

Catfish Rolling. Clara Kumagai 2023. London: Head of Zeus.

My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Thomas Ligotti 2002; 2009 repr. Virgin Books.

The Hour of the Star. Lispector, Clarice. 1977; Translated by Benjamin Moser. 2014 repr. Penguin.

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape. Manchán Magan 2020. Dublin: Gill Books.

A Memory Called Empire. Arkady Martine 2019. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

A Desolation Called Peace. Arkady Martine 2021. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

Tokyo Express. Seichō Matsumoto 1958; Translated by Jesse Kirkwood. 2023 repr. Penguin.

A Severed Head. Iris Murdoch 1961; 2006 repr. Vintage.

Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs. Gerald Murnane 2005; 2020 repr. And Other Stories.

Ice Apprentices. Jacob North 2025. Simon and Schuster.

The Quick and the Dead: Selected Stories. Mairtin O Cadhain. 2021 Collected edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The Thursday Murder Club. Richard Osman 2020. Penguin.

Talk of the Town. Jacob Polley 2009. London: Picador.

Mikhail Bakhtin. Alastair Renfrew 2014. London: Routledge.

Arrival. David Roche 2024. 21st Century Film Essentials. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Dolly Considine’s Hotel. Eamon Somers 2021. London: Unbound.

The Book Collector. Alice Thompson 2015. Cromer: Salt Publishing Limited.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Peter Turchi 2004; 2005 repr. Trinity Univ. Press.

Lost Estates. Mark Valentine 2024. Dublin: Swan River Press.

The Collected Connoisseur. Mark Valentine and John Howard 2010. Leyburn: Tartarus Press.

Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Jeff VanderMeer 2018. Revised & Expanded edition. New York, NY: Abrams Image.

The War of the Worlds. H. G. Wells 1898; digital vers. Project Gutenberg.

A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology. Toby A. H. Wilkinson 2020. London: Picador.

To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf 1927; 1998 repr. Penguin Books Fiction. London: Penguin.

I read most of these books to the end; one had to be returned to the library unfinished as I was too busy to continue at the time, and I pulled the plug on a couple of others that were doing nothing for me after a few chapters. Most were new to me, though a handful were re-reads.

You can also see this overview in Goodreads.