Reading

My Year of Reading in 2024

Saturday, January 4, 2025 • 7 min read

I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.

Favorites

The best non-fiction book I read last year was An Immense World by Ed Yong. The book shares how other animals sense the world in ways humans cannot. The book covers dozens of species, from an elephant’s incredible sense of smell to how spiders sense and surf on electric charges in the Earth’s atmosphere. You can’t read these amazing stories without shifting uncomfortably in your chair. We think we understand reality but are too limited by our senses. We are not seeing the whole picture. This is a mind-expanding book.

My favorite novels spanned three centuries:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a short, spare novella written in 2021 and set in 1980s Ireland. In just 109 pages, Keegan puts you squarely in the mind and body of its protagonist, Furlong. You feel the pangs of long-ago childhood angst, the chill of an Irish cold spell, the ugliness of small-town bigotry, the warmth of a coal stove, the despair over human cruelty. The Irish dialogue rings out like music or birdsong, making me wish American English wasn’t so flat and ordinary. I felt sad to leave Furlong’s side after so short a visit and longed to know what happened next, but the tale and ending were told in just the right way, with just the right words. Keegan is a poet masquerading as a novelist.

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf had been on my to-read pile for years. I was leery of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, and its Goodreads reviews were concerning. Yet I loved it. Perhaps it wouldn’t have clicked with me if I had read this book ten years ago. Sometimes, a book finds you when you’re most ready for it. I was ready. No spoilers, but prepare to be gutted in the second half. You can judge the impact of a book on how long you think about it after you’ve read it. Eight months later, and I am still thinking about this one.

Finally, I adored David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I read this as homework for the highly touted Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver, a modern retelling of this classic. Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters will eventually make sense. My head spun with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I should have known better. By the end, no matter how minor, every character returned, and I understood their part in the story. Sure, this involved unlikely coincidences for our protagonist, but I loved the resulting tapestry of those many loose threads woven together. After spending almost 900 pages with these characters, some incredibly kind, some evil, I felt reluctant to part with them. Reading the book right ahead of Demon Copperfield made it feel like Kingsolver wrote high quality fan fiction. Dickens was indeed a true master. 

The Story of Civilization — A Marathon, Not a Sprint

In 2024, I continued my multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s epic eleven-volume Story of Civilization. I read six more books, taking me from Renaissance Italy to the eve of the French Revolution in late 18th-century Europe. I should complete this journey in early 2025 with final volume, The Age of Napoleon. I’ll write a follow-up review of my takeaways from the complete series when I finish volume XI, but for now, let me say that the experience has been incredibly rewarding.

Stephen King — Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

I have read more Stephen King novels than any other author, dead or alive. Last year, I vowed to tackle the ones I missed to read all 75 of this amazing storyteller’s works. I read three more from his backlog in 2024, none of which hit the mark. I have another twelve more books to complete this quest, but my enthusiasm has waned. I guess there was a reason I didn’t read these last books: even the greatest writers have their duds. However, his latest book of short stories, You Like It Darker, was fantastic. Some writers truly do get better with age.

My Reading System

I use the Bear note-taking and writing app to keep my reading notes and links to my personal note system. I switched over from Craft at the beginning of 2024, and I have been pleased with the added capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities of Bear.

I use Readwise to collect and review notes and highlights from my reading. Last year, I added over 700 new highlights to the system for a total of 2,400 collected passages.

I started using tags in Readwise about midway through 2024. I’m not sure why it took me so long. During a morning review of random highlights, adding one or more tags to a passage is simple. Tagged quotes accumulate into a digital commonplace book within Readwise, almost replicating what I have in Bear. Sharing a beautifully formatted quote from Readwise is easier and better than anything I could do from Bear:

 The Readwise app hasn’t received any new features in years, as the team has focused almost exclusively on its read-it-later app, Reader. However, a recent Reddit comment from a member of the Readwise team shared that significant improvements are coming in 2025. I’m heartened to know they haven’t forgotten the humble book in their quest to dominate online reading.

In addition to Bear, I store my book notes in a Day One reading journal. I love how easy it is to review the books I’ve read in the timeline view or see the book covers of all the books in the media view. I’ve imported seven years worth of book notes, so the “on this day” review in Day One shows the books I read alongside my journal entries. It’s another great way to reflect on my reading.

The Great TBR Reset of 2025

Over the holidays, I reviewed my ever-growing To-Be-Read list of books. All serious readers have a TBR, and mine had grown so large that I realized I would never get to all of them. I decided it was time for a purge.

Out of a list of 400 books, I marked each with my current interest level: low, medium, high. When I finished, I had narrowed the list to just 50 books, each of which I’m genuinely excited to read. I could work through the entire list in a year, though I know I won’t. It’s impossible to resist that perfect book that comes out of nowhere. Still, looking at my TBR list with more excitement than dread feels much better. If your TBR list has gotten out of hand, the new year is a great time to consider a reset.

Happy reading in 2025!

The post My Year of Reading in 2024 appeared first on Robert Breen.

Finished reading: The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • 1 min read

Finished reading: The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant 📚

My straight-through reading of this mammoth 11-volume history continues. Volume VIII shares a detailed view of Europe in the 17th Century. So much war and bloodshed and atrocity, and yet brilliance too.

From Durant:

Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair.

★★★★★