Words Per Mile

We bought our first house at the end of 2023, and moved in January. During this move, I realized that I owned a lot of books that I hadn’t even read. To reduce the hoard, and meet my goal of appreciating the things I have, I set a goal of reading 100 books in 2024, with the plan of keeping those I loved, and setting aside others to create a Little Free Library in the spring of 2025.

Amazingly, I managed to meet the goal! (Getting laid off in November helped a little.) Most of these books I already owned, but some I bought this year and some came from the library. Most are print, but some I listened to on either Audible or Libby. The list is primarily fiction or nonfiction I read for pleasure, but some are business books that I received for free or read with the intent of progressing my career. I’ve reviewed some of these, and hope to review more in the future, but for now I just want to flop down on my couch and bask in this accomplishment.

Hit me up if you need a recommendation!

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How I Made This List

Want to make a list like this yourself? Here’s how I did it.

On GoodReads: Go to My Books, click on Settings, and chose what info you want in your list. Highlight the page, and copy and paste into a Word doc. Make sure you only include books you made this year! Save the doc.

On ChatGPT: Open a new conversation and attach the doc you just saved. Prompt the AI with something like “Please extract a list of books and their authors from this doc. Put them in a numbered list.” From there, you may need to ask it to make a few tweaks, such as flipping the order of the list, adding italics, etc.

Here are the 100 books I read in 2024, with some highlights in bold text:

1. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
2. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
3. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
4. Normal People by Sally Rooney
5. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
6. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
7. The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo
8. You Will Remember Me by Hannah Mary McKinnon
9. Cultish by Amanda Montell
10. Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1) by Leigh Bardugo
11. Type Talk at Work by Otto Kroeger
12. Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2) by Leigh Bardugo
13. Girl Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis
14. The Death of Expertise by Thomas M. Nichols
15. Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #1) by Leigh Bardugo
16. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
17. A Keeper by Graham Norton
18. Siege and Storm (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #2) by Leigh Bardugo
19. Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3) by Leigh Bardugo
20. The Cult of We by Eliot Brown
21. The Goblin Emperor (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1) by Katherine Addison
22. The Witness for the Dead (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1) by Katherine Addison
23. The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
24. The Grief of Stones (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #2) by Katherine Addison
25. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
26. Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E. Lieberman
27. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
28. The Returned by Jason Mott
29. Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
30. Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
31. One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
32. Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg
33. Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Riedel
34. Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement by Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer
35. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
36. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
37. Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
38. Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham
39. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
40. Upgrade by Blake Crouch
41. Deep Work by Cal Newport
42. The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
43. The Bees by Laline Paull
44. Babel by R.F. Kuang
45. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
46. These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
47. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis
48. The Antidote For Everything by Kimmery Martin
49. A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon
50. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
51. Never the Wind by Francesco Dimitri
52. Wellness by Nathan Hill
53. The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
54. The Waking Land (The Waking Land, #1) by Callie Bates
55. Trust by Hernan Diaz
56. Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg
57. The Memory of Fire (The Waking Land, #2) by Callie Bates
58. Courting Greta by Ramsey Hootman
59. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
60. Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas, #1) by Zoraida Córdova
61. Asserting Yourself by Sharon Anthony Bower
62. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
63. The Council of Athyzia (The Athyziad, #1) by D.H. Hoskins
64. Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick
65. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee
66. Bruja Born (Brooklyn Brujas, #2) by Zoraida Córdova
67. You Are Here by David Nicholls
68. Wayward Witch (Brooklyn Brujas, #3) by Zoraida Córdova
69. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
70. Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz
71. The Name of All Things (A Chorus of Dragons, #2) by Jenn Lyons
72. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
73. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
74. Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati
75. iGen by Jean M. Twenge
76. The Memory of Souls (A Chorus of Dragons Book 3) by Jenn Lyons
77. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
78. The House of Always (A Chorus of Dragons #4) by Jenn Lyons
79. Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1) by Elizabeth Strout
80. The Discord of Gods (A Chorus of Dragons #5) by Jenn Lyons
81. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
82. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
83. Book of Night (Book of Night, #1) by Holly Black
84. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
85. They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1) by Adam Silvera
86. Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner
87. The Measure by Nikki Erlick
88. This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
89. The Spice Gate by Prashanth Srivatsa
90. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
91. Seven Lies by Elizabeth Kay
92. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
93. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
94. Bunny by Mona Awad
95. The Scarlet Alchemist (The Scarlet Alchemist, #1) by Kylie Lee Baker
96. A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny
97. Hum by Helen Phillips
98. Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
99. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
100. The Stone Witch of Florence by Anna Rasche