Rapid Fire: The Books I Read in 2024
I’ll be the first to say that yes, this one is a little late. Apologies there to those of you who have been F5-ing this page for the last ~50 days waiting for a new “what did Ryan read” post to go up. Without further ado, here are the books I read in 2024.
The List
Homecoming*
The Writing Retreat
The Midnight Library
Looking for Alaska
Naked Statistics
Sacre Bleu
The Late Shift
Entangled Life*
Inferno
Carrie
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Just One Look
The Girl in the Eagles Talons
Friday Night Lights
Beartown
11/22/63
In Persuasion Nation
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
Yellowface
Sapiens
Origin
Don't Let Her Stay*
Us Against You
Where the Crawdads Sing
Why We Love Baseball
Lincoln in the Bardo
Misery
Waiting To Be Heard
Hocus Pocus
Wake of the Hornet
One Perfect Couple*
Fear
Little Fires Everywhere
Dark Places*
Poirot Investigates
The War for Late Night
Mistborn*
Murder on the Orient Express
Less
Say Nothing*
The Arrest
Murder at Wrigley Field
Stranger Than Fiction
The Well of Ascension*
Hex
The Hero of Ages*
The Stand
Bluebeard*
*Indicates the book was read as a part of a book club.
Favorite Book of the Year
The Midnight Library
This book was uh, really good. It was good enough that I bought it for both my dad and my sister for Christmas. Honestly my dad may hate it (sorry Matt Haig if ur reading this) since it has emotions and stuff.
11/22/63 was a very close second (you’re welcome Stephen King if ur reading this).
Books That Had At Least One Typo
The Well of Ascension
Stranger than Fiction
Don’t Let Her Stay
I understand typos. I know for a fact that there are at least two on the front page of this site, and at least one in most of the content I write. If I see a red squiggle I’m going to take a look at it, but any typo that results in another extant word (ie. writing “bead” instead of “bread”) is going to slip through the cracks. That said, I don’t have an editor. Each of the books listed above did. They presumably had more than one person read the book prior to going to print. I also do not make any money off of this site, and only like 3 people have even visited it, so really I dont know why I’m comparing myself to these professional authors. They should have spellchecked.
Books That Featured a Main Character Named Nora
Homecoming
The Midnight Library.
According to the Social Security Administration (quick, before the US gov ceases to exist!) the name Nora hasn’t crested past 25th in popularity since 2000, and reached its peak in 2023 at 0.343% of all female births. Considering the following:
I read 48 books this year.
I’ll estimate 3-4 “main” characters in each book.
I’ll also, for ease of math, split the male/female character rate 50/50.
That means that there was only a 3.5% chance that I would read two books this year with a main character named Nora. This is roughly the same probability as getting audited by the IRS if you make around $50k per year (3%), pulling a red queen from a shuffled deck of cards (~3.85%), or the chances of anyone reading this post in its entirety (~2.01%).
