SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Share with us about your reading journey this year!

Check your GR year in review:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_i...


Any cool trends/analyses/insights you have on what you read this year?

Well, I knew my reading slowed down a lot this year, but I didn't realize how much! I've only read 83 books this year compared to 157 in 2023.

I read only 34 📚, since I am in grad school. I miss reading fun 📚!

Managed to read 65/65 this year. A superb year of reading full of 4* and 5*s.

Also this seems to my year of completing long running series - finished The Last King of Osten Ard (Tad Williams) and The Dandelion Dynasty (Ken Liu) at the fag end of the year. A sense of completion as well as a bit of fatigue 😄

I'm excited to see that this year Goodreads is actually counting the print version page numbers for books read as audiobooks when they calculate the total pages read. (A lot of times audiobooks are listed as having only 5-6 pages.) Though, this created a very funny situation for me where my shortest book is listed as having 40 pages (a picture book) and my longest book is listed as being only 25 pages (an audiobook version where the print version is actually 579 pages).

Well I read a lot. Special thanks to Murderbot and Drizzt--those series are actually why I came back to GR this year.

And before anyone compares themselves to me, I retired this year due to illness so my schedule has been free for reading. But I do know what it is like to try to read when you have a job or school and other stuff. It's why I hadn't been doing nearly as much reading in recent years and this year I tried to do some catching up.

Even with all I read this year, I feel a barely made a dent in what I want to get caught up on, whether it's rereads, or reading older books I never got around to, or reading more current releases.

72,216
pages read

207
books read not counting the Delphi ones (Rinehart had 38 books)

Themis Files archive
Shortest Book
6 pages

Delphi Collected Works of Mary Roberts Rinehart by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Longest Book
7,942 pages

Average book length in 2024
348 pages


Animal Farm by George Orwell
Most Shelved
6,233,661 people

Delphi Collected Works of Mary Roberts Rinehart by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Least Shelved
11 people

Neighborhood Birding 101 by Seymore Gulls
Highest Rated on Goodreads
5.00 average

That is a lot more than I thought. I set out for a book a week. Read 93 books out of the 52. And I know that I wrote a review on each. So that was all pretty good news.

Congrats on the reviews! That's a bigger achievement in my mind than reading the books!

I am actually very happy about my reading year, especially considering that I've been sick twice in the summer and hardly read a page in September and October.

Thanks in no small part to this group, I braved books and series that were long-time residents of my wishlist: I've read three books and a handful of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, my first Delany, more recently one of G. Willow Wilson's novels.

I resumed reading in Spanish from both Spain (Layla Martínez) and Mexico (Álvaro Enrigue); but also Thailand (Saneh Sangsuk). I've read the new Lauren Groff and finally tackled Percival Everett. There's been illustrated books and YA, amazing graphic novels and comics: including an old Miyazaki, the last Taniguchi, the only Jemisin (so far) and the entire recent Marvel era of Conan the Barbarian. In recent months I started a project on the translations of Beowulf first planned years ago.

I hit 10K pages, which has been the norm in recent years. I can't wait to do it again.
I originally set a goal of 60 books, updated to 80 when I started adding picture books and such; but now I might have to revert to 60 after all.

I've also been trying to write reviews again. I used to do it regularly during uni and stopped mainly because work. But I realised that I remember better books that I read and reviewed 15 years ago than the ones I read and didn't review ten years later.

I should add that writing a couple of lines as a comment doesn't work for me; my personal preference is closer to a proper article.

It looks like I will end up reading fewer books and fewer pages by about 5-10% in 2024 compared with 2023. Also, I will almost certainly fail to complete the TBR and Zodiac challenges successfully. However I’ve read a lot of very good books, so I don’t mind. Also there were a couple of life circumstances that may have slowed me down, ready-made excuses if I want to use them as such. My average grades etc. seem about the same.

Reading books you enjoyed is always a positive. I think reading well outweighs reading more in any case.

Mildly amusing: shortest book 20 pages, longest book 1,463 pages. :) Also, 1,987,987 people shelved my longest book making it the most shelved. I saw the musical version of that book last year and it was awesome.

Wicked?

I was thinking Les Miserables. Don’t leave us in suspense!

Sarah wrote: "I was thinking Les Miserables. Don’t leave us in suspense!"

I thought it was obvious. Yes. Les Mis. Almost killed me but I'm glad I got through it.

I do love Wicked also, but haven't read a book if there is one. I've been fortunate to see Les Mis and Wicked live here in Phoenix. OT: Saw the Wicked movie couple of days ago. Mixed feelings.

There is a book! It is very sad!

The book Wicked is sooooo much better than the musical. But they are totally different experiences, so I won’t compare. I read the book shortly after it came out (25 years or so ago!) and looooved it. I’m a huge Wizard of Oz fan, so I was blown away.

I'm dying. I read the book shortly after it came out and was traumatized by how uncomfortable it made me feel. So much so that I avoided the musical in all forms because I thought it would be the same.

I didn't like it either and casting an African-american as the wicked witch seems a bit negative.

I’m not sure it matters what color the actors skin is because the wicked witch (or Elfaba) has green skin.

me either but for some reason it bothers me

For me the songs were the best part of the musical and the movie, and I thought Cynthia Erivo's singing was very good as the movie Elphaba. I can't get through the original Broadway cast recording without weeping it is so good with Idina Menzel as Elphaba.

OK, I may read one or two more before 2025, but this is probably as good a time as any to assess this year's reading.

I ended up reading 127 books this year, and 35 of them were by Lois McMaster Bujold. 😂 I went on a spree, starting with Paladin of Souls in January 2024, through all of the World of the Five Gods books (including Penric novellas) and all of the Vorkosigan books. I am even finishing the year with her Spirit Ring (but I may not finish it by Dec 31st). I regret this not at all. :-)

About 60% of my reading was print/ebook and 40% was audio. 94% fiction and 6% nonfiction. SF&F were my top two genres (by a lot), followed by LGBTQIA+, YA, and short stories.

Looking forward to another great year of reading in 2025!