2024: A Year in Books and Blogging

Happy New Year! 🥳

At the start of the year, I like to look back over the previous twelve months from a books and blogging perspective. It’s nice to summarise the year and, as long-time followers of this blog will know, I don’t need much excuse to roll out a few stats.

Last year was an incredibly busy year for me (mostly in a positive way), and I have to admit that blogging had to take a backseat at times.  I think that I need to accept that I can’t blog as much as I sometimes expect, and not let that lead to long periods of absence as has happened in the last year.  This year, I’m aiming for more regular, if perhaps not quite as a frequent, posts.  We’ll see how it goes.

I didn’t actually get around to posting my top reads of the year post, something that I normally like to do to celebrate some of the books that I’ve particularly enjoyed.  Of those published in 2024, my favourites were:

• Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz
• You Are Here by David Nicholls
• Table for Two by Amor Towles
• By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
• The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre

And a few more reading stats for the last year:

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While I don’t pay much attention to the stats WordPress provides throughout the year, I do like to look at which of my posts were the most viewed come year end – it’s usually not the ones that I expect it to be! For 2024, the following were my most viewed posts, all of which are posts from earlier years:

• Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky – originally reviewed in 2022, I think that this one post has single-handedly kept my blog alive in the last year with activity ramping up significantly from July 2024 onwards. I have absolutely no idea why, but I’m thrilled 😊
• All Her Fault by Andrea Mara – this one has had relatively steady activity since I first posted it in 2021
• The Island by Victoria Hislop
• The Baltimore Boys by Joël Dicker
• Us Against You by Fredrik Backman and translated by Neil Smith

Of the posts I did publish in 2024, the following were my most viewed:

• Arsene Lupin Gentleman Thief by Maurice LeBlanc
• A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz
• The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore

Here’s to a great 2025! 🎉