2024 was my lowest year since I've maintained this blog in terms of books and pages read. This year, I read 13,057 pages over 30 books, averaging about 435 pages per book. I'm not sure I can identify any clear theme. As always, I focused on history. I read a good amount of biographies/memoirs about Joe Stilwell, Jim Mattis, Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and Stalin. I also read three books about disasters at sea. All in all, I was pretty busy this year and it was a weaker year for the blog, but that's exactly what I expected a year ago. This year I'll do my top six books of the year since number 5 and 6 were so close in quality and theme. The top six were:
5. (tie) King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
5. (tie) Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
I'm just putting these two together to say they are both incredible biographies of two men whose lives are intertwined despite having only met once, and briefly at that.
4. Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond
This was an excellent history book that was a comprehensive survey of 20th century Chicago. It was a social history, largely focused on racial and ethnic identities.
3. America's First Cuisines by Sophie D. Coe
This was such a cool book that was an absolute revelation on what Native Americans ate before 1492, mainly in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Really, really interesting stuff.
2. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann
An absolute epic. In the War of Jenkins' Ear, British ships on the way to raid the Chilean coast are separated in a storm in the Strait of Magellan. The Wager is shipwrecked. There is mutiny, interactions with native Chileans, hard justice, bitter cold, and starvation. And at the end, the survivors return to England to tell their story. But it's not the whole story. Another group of survivors arrives about a year later and reveals that the first group were the mutineers and a court-martial ensues.
1. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
A masterwork in history that tells the story of the Great Migration through three individuals who did it. Wilkerson weaves together national movements with their individual stories across the United States and their entire lives. I think this book is one of the best books I've ever read in American History.
Honorable Mentions:
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
The Best-Written Blog Posts of the Year (in no particular order):
- The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
- The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis
- The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze
- The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence
- America's First Cuisines by Sophie D. Coe
- The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern
- Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
- King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
- A History of the Classical Greek World 478-323 BC (Second Edition) by P.J. Rhodes
Books and Pages per Month
February: 6 books, 2,519 pages
March:1 book, 288 pages
April: 5 books, 2,294 pages
May: 2 books, 439 pages
June: 2 book, 992 pages
July: 2 books, 1,214 pages
August: 1 book, 802 pages
September: 2 books, 1,296 pages
October: 1 book, 622 pages
November: 2 books, 425 pages
December: 3 books, 1,137 pages
Gender Breakdown (some books have multiple authors)
28 Male Authors
5 Female Authors
Years of Publication:
1900-1949: 1
1950-1959: 1
1960-1969: 2
1970-1979: 2
1980-1989: 1
1990-1999: 3
2000-2009: 4
2010-2019: 8
2020-2024: 7
2024: 13,057 pages over 30 books, averaging about 435 pages per book.
2023: 15,629 pages over 42 books, averaging about 372 pages per book.
2022: 22,902 pages over 50 books, averaging about 458 pages per book.
2021: 14,144 pages over 27 books, averaging about 524 pages per book.
2020: 13,415 pages over 32 books, averaging about 419 pages per book.
2019: 55,502 pages over 116 books, averaging about 478 pages per book.
2018: 18,122 pages over 33 books, averaging about 549 pages per book.
No comments:
Post a Comment