— Arthur H. Manners — Author of science fiction

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Books Read in 2024

I had hoped to write some kind of end of year post in December 2024. Maybe even a brief newsletter. But neither of those things happened. I don’t know how people get around to it. Oh well, better late than never.

Continuing on from reports in 2022 and 2023 (inspired by a similar analysis from Kate McKean’s excellent newsletter), here’s the breakdown for the books I read in 2024. The list includes things I finished, but also DNFs if I finished an appreciable portion of the book before putting it down.

I read 66 books in 2024. I can immediately report that I read a lot of short fiction on my e-reader, and listened to a lot of podcasts. But beyond that, I need to dig into the numbers.

Genres

Slightly more fiction this year, but it seems like I naturally gravitate to a 50/50 split on fiction/non-fiction. More sci-fi than last year, but much less fantasy. Surprising—I hadn’t noticed the lack of fantasy.

A closer look at non-fiction

Overall this more closely resembles 2022 than 2023. Apparently I got a taste for books on writing craft this year—interesting, given I wouldn’t have guessed that. Memoir was still big but tied with science—again, surprising, as I would have said I read much more science. I picked up a lot of other interesting things this year in non-fiction, and it’s nice to see that reflected here.

Book formats

As usual, mostly paperback. My audiobook listening was almost nonexistent. I was aware that I picked up a lot of hardbacks this year, which was a real joy. However, I hadn’t really appreciated just how few ebooks I read this year. I have been reading a lot of short fiction on my e-reader, which probably accounts for my lack of awareness.

Minority voices

Still on an upward trend here (60/40 in 2022, 52/48 in 2023). I recall putting in a lot of effort on this in 2022, and somewhat in 2023, but I hadn’t really paid any attention to this in 2024 beyond noticing that my bookshelf looks more diverse than it used to. It’s nice to see that this has become more of a sustained habit that I don’t have to consciously maintain.

Completed vs partial reads

I count books as ‘read’ on my log even if I don’t read them cover to cover. As a rule of thumb, if I get more than halfway, I’ll count it. I DNFed 8 books this year, roughly the same percentage as last year. Looking at the books in question, they were mostly longer works that, for me, seemed to fizzle out.

For reference, here’s the list (see the Book Log for previous years):

  1. Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer
  2. The Fran Leibowitz Reader by Fran Leibowitz
  3. Drown by Junot Dîaz
  4. Payback by Margaret Atwood
  5. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas by Maya Angelou
  6. Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
  7. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
  8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
  9. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
  10. Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
  11. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  12. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
  13. Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton
  14. Two Cures for Love by Wendy Cope
  15. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
  16. And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
  17. The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
  18. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
  19. Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
  20. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  21. The Fire of Joy by Clive James
  22. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
  23. Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
  24. Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
  25. When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
  26. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
  27. Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness by Catherine Cho
  28. All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva
  29. The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
  30. Poems of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy
  31. Upstream by Mary Oliver
  32. Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
  33. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  34. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
  35. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  36. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
  37. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
  38. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
  39. Oathbringer, Part 1 by Brandon Sanderson
  40. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  41. The Time Hunter by Italo Calvino
  42. The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
  43. Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings
  44. Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope
  45. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
  46. One Day by David Nicholls
  47. Howard’s End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
  48. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
  49. Selected Poems by W. H. Auden
  50. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
  51. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
  52. Quiet by Susan Cain
  53. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  54. Collected Poems by Simon Armitage
  55. How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran
  56. Ascension by Nicholas Binge
  57. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  58. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
  59. Think by Simon Blackburn
  60. Wool by Hugh Howey
  61. Grit by Angela Duckworth
  62. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
  63. Sentience by Thomas Humphrey
  64. There Is No Antimemetics Division by Qntm
  65. The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur
  66. Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Books Read 2023

Continuing in the line of a similar post from last year (inspired by a similar analysis from Kate McKean’s excellent newsletter), here’s the breakdown for the books I read in 2023. The list includes things I finished, but also DNFs if I finished an appreciable portion of the book before putting it down.

I read 52 books in 2023. Reading was a mixed bag for me last year. I went through spells of reading voraciously and not reading at all. I also had a surprising number of DNFs or things I didn’t particularly enjoy—at least, it felt that way.

Genres

The 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction was incidental. Not much change in other areas, except sci-fi for less sci-fi and more fantasy.

A closer look at non-fiction

A mixed bag for non-fiction. Memoir came out on top, probably egged on by how much I enjoyed Tara Westover’s Educated. Craft/Creativity dropped off a bit, but it’s still joint-second with science.

Book formats

Audiobook and hardback traded places since 2022. I revived Audible and hardbacks were a bit too expensive on the year’s budget. I also listened to a lot of podcasts—even more than usual.

Minority voices

I did a bit better this year (60/40 -> 52/48). I’m pleased about that, given the effort I put into diversifying my book purchases. With any luck, that won’t be a statistical fluke but a new normal.

Completed vs partial reads

I count books as ‘read’ on my log even if I don’t read them cover to cover. As a rule of thumb, if I get more than halfway, I’ll count it. Surprisingly, I finished more books in 2023 than in 2022 (90/10 vs 84/16). It definitely didn’t feel that way. But that’s 47 finished, 5 DNFed).

For reference, here’s the list (see the Book Log for previous years):

  1. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
  2. Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
  3. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
  4. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris
  5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  6. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
  7. The White Album by Joan Didion
  8. How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
  9. The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa
  10. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
  11. My Body by Emily Ratajkowski
  12. The Outsider by Albert Camus
  13. Temeraire by Naomi Novik
  14. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematorium by Caitlin Doughty
  15. Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
  16. Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
  17. Toast by Nigel Slater
  18. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
  19. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  20. Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou
  21. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  22. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
  23. Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
  24. Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy
  25. Educated by Tara Westover
  26. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  27. Words of Radiance, Part 2 by Brandon Sanderson
  28. The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
  29. The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy by Arik Kershenbaum
  30. The Alchemy of Architecture by Ken Tate
  31. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
  32. Chaos by James Gleick
  33. The Pelican Brief by John Grisham
  34. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  35. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
  36. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
  37. Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit
  38. World War Z by Max Brooks
  39. Heligoland by Carlo Rovelli
  40. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
  41. Gotta Read It! by Libbie Hawker
  42. On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
  43. The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss
  44. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
  45. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
  46. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (re-read)
  47. At Home by Bill Bryson (re-read)
  48. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  49. One Summer by Bill Bryson (re-read)
  50. Redshirts by John Scalzi
  51. A Poet for Every Day of the Year by Allie Esiri
  52. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

2022 in Books

This post is inspired by Kate McKean’s recent newsletter article, which I thought was a great way to visualise, rather than just list, books read last year.

I read 50 books in 2022, which makes me very happy. It’s been a hard year at work and in my personal life, but I’ve still found time for reading. That’s an average of almost a book a week — though I definitely squeezed a final few in there over Christmas to give a satisfying round number.

Genres

58% fiction, 42% non-fiction. I’m not surprised that sci-fi tops the list of fiction, nor by the tie between fantasy, horror and literary fiction. I haven’t done this kind of analysis on previous years, but that pretty much aligns with my gut instinct about my reading tastes. More unusually for me, thriller/crime are >0% — I’m trying to branch out a bit into what is usually a dull genre for me. My guess is that I’m drifting year-on-year from a fiction-dominated appetite to something more balanced.

A closer look at non-fiction

Looking closer at non-fiction, it’s obvious that ‘Craft/Creativity’ was a hot topic for me. These were mostly books about writing or about artists. I’ve enjoyed reading more essays and memoir this year, and my reading list for 2023 is leaning into that. Self-help reading centred around creativity, productivity and introversion/sensitivity.

Book formats

I’m shocked by how few audiobooks I listened to this year. Over the last 10 years I’ve usually had an audiobook on the go most of the time. But this year I’ve been listening to so many podcasts that I haven’t really had time for audiobooks. 24% ebooks sounds about right, though also might be a reduction from previous years. I do tend to mostly read paperbacks, so there’s no surprises here, but there are definitely more hardbacks than I anticipated (lots of these were gifts — if friends/family are reading this, yes please, more hardbacks for my birthday next year).

Minority voices

This analysis is definitely reductive. I haven’t researched people’s identities in detail. In any case, artists shouldn’t have to divulge details of their personal lives to further their careers. I’ve gone with ‘white and/or cis-gender male’ as the easiest questions to answer. A 60/40 split isn’t bad, but it’s not brilliant either. I think it’s better than previous years, but the trend will be clearer if this analysis gets repeated in future years.

Completed vs partial reads

I count books as ‘read’ on my log even if I don’t read them cover to cover. Sometimes books lose momentum or I lose interest, but I still feel that I’ve absorbed the essence of the book. As a rule of thumb, if I get more than halfway, I’ll count it. But it looks like I read 84% of books cover to cover this year. That’s 42 books completed, 8 partial reads.

For reference, here’s the list (see the Book Log for previous years):

  1. The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield
  2. Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
  3. Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
  4. Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder
  5. It Happened in ‘Loontown by Lavie Tidhar (short story)
  6. The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
  7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
  8. The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley
  9. Siege & Storm by Leigh Bardugo
  10. This Is Water by David Foster Wallace
  11. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
  12. Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal
  13. Why I Write by George Orwell
  14. The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers
  15. The Fisherman by John Langan
  16. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
  17. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
  18. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
  19. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
  20. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
  21. Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
  22. Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
  23. Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
  24. The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
  25. Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
  26. Art Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
  27. 1Q84: Book Three by Haruki Murakami
  28. A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
  29. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
  30. Permission to Screw Up by Kristen Hadeed 
  31. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  32. Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
  33. What It Is by Lynda Barry
  34. The Stormlight Archive: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
  35. Acceptance by Jeff VenderMeer
  36. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
  37. Mistborn: Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
  38. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
  39. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
  40. Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell
  41. Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith
  42. Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight
  43. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
  44. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
  45. The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu
  46. Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey
  47. Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin
  48. Ringworld by Larry Niven
  49. Cauldron by Jack McDevitt
  50. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ask for playlists for your birthday

This post is about Kevin Kelly, whom I came across lately after reading somebody’s newsletter. Despite my best efforts, I can’t remember whose newsletter it was. My apologies to the ether for not giving due credit.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, has curated a lot of cool odds and ends, hosted on a part of his website called The Technium. When he turned 68, he celebrated by publishing a list of 68 pieces of advice.

He then did 99 pieces of advice another year. The latest is a list of 103 pieces of advice.

Kelly talked about these lists recently, especially his latest, on the Freakonomics podcast. Something he said on the podcast leaped out at me. Paraphrasing, he sums his efforts to avoid getting stuck in a rut as:

Don’t sit in the same chair every day. Avoid getting in a rut. For my birthday, I ask my kids for playlists of what music they’ve been listening to lately.

I love this idea. What could be a better birthday gift than lists of the best music, films, books etc. that the people you love have found lately?

I’m 30 now, that age where people start to become more set in their ways. Is this the way to stay fresh?

Music playlists would be especially good for me. I listen to a lot of music, but I’m one of those people who puts on the radio or auto-compiled Spotify lists, and has no idea which artists they’re listening to.

Books are the obvious ask, but I usually ask for specific books that are on my list. That runs the risk missing out on a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of. Maybe it’d be better to ask people for books they love.

Creative Hiatus for Rest

Bill Hayes put out an article at LitHub in January: The Rest Principle: On the Necessity of Recovery, in Fitness and Writing. Taking a course for personal trainers while researching a book on exercise, the critical value of rest in making gains really hit him.

He talks about a gap in his writing career:

In some cases, it’s not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. After completing my book The Anatomist, I wrote virtually nothing for almost three years. I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep. It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out.

My own experience with writing is similar. Some months, I’ll write four blog posts and fragments of three short stories, and a novel chapter, in a weekend. Other times, I’ll go whole months and barely write a thing.

I spend a lot of time researching how to do less, so that I can accomplish more of what really matters to me. Lately it’s led me to Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, Tom Hodgkinson’s Being Idle, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Cal Newport’s model of Slow Productivity, and Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals. (Full credit and appreciation to Austin Kleon, Matt Bell and Ezra Klein for making me aware of these.)

But, like almost everyone, I’m terrible at putting these ideas into practice. What I really want is time to write. Not to become a successful writer (though that sounds great), but to have the time to actually do the act of writing. There’s probably nothing special in that — it’s just flow state. Everyone has something that gives them that timeless sense of being fully engrossed.

But things get in the way. I wrote and edited four short stories I the first three months of this year. But for the last two months I’ve barely touched a writing project. It’s a brittle practice, sensitive to being crowded out by other things that, at the time, seem more pressing.

The ideal would be to have a robust practice, to organise my life so that the stable equilibrium would be a day with inviolable time and energy with which to focus on my writing projects. A disturbance inevitably arises that knocks me from equilibrium, but I relax back to that stable state.

The question is how to build such a life.

That brings me, long-windedly, to rest. Hayes writes:

Don’t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.

I suspect a lot of the stops and starts with my writing ultimately stem from chronic burnout, a lack of patience, and not being connected enough with my body to recognise when to stop and recharge.

Our life has been hectic the last few months, to say the least. Supporting my family through some hard times, working at a tech startup (which inevitably leads to working some nights and weekends), buying a house, my partner changing jobs, and ongoing health issues, have all taken a toll.

Whenever I get a spare few hours, a lull in the storm, I dive for the keyboard. For maybe an hour, I manage to convince myself that I can write an entire novel draft in a week, before life crashes over me again. I can do it, if I just arse-to-chair and force it.

But I’m not sure who wants to read something written by a mind that’s letting off the smell of burnt toast. Sleep deprivation can produce similar symptoms to being drunk, and impair attention, arithmetic ability, episodic memory, and working memory. Long-term burnout is even more insidious, lowering your baseline cognitive performance, so that you’re not only underperforming, but your ability to think about how to fix the problem is also shot.

Having read, Hayes’ article, I’m wondering whether it’s better to make the decision to not create anything for a while. There’s advice everywhere from creators about the discipline of grinding out your work, even if you’re not in the space (see Mason Curey’s Daily Rituals for plenty of examples). It’s about forming the habit, it’s about discipline.

But what’s the advantage of discipline if you’re barely present in the moment, existing on fumes?

This isn’t an announcement of abandoning creative pursuits, but it’s important to note this counterargument on what to do when times are tough. I have a note above my monitor that says “Stop. Breathe.” Hayes is arguing for us to listen to that more often:

My rule of thumb in fitness training is two-to-one: for every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, “in cases of sustained high-level output,” according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me creatively. I needed a really, really long rest.