Hey everybody, welcome to a bonus episode of the podcast, and this time it's just going to be something I think I did last year where I'm going to just talk about everything that I read in 2024. This is a video, I will post it to my YouTube page, but if you're not one of the, you know...
dozen or so people who subscribe there. I'm also dropping it in the podcast. If you want to follow along, I'm using My Year in Books from Goodreads. I will put a link in the show notes, so if you want to click through there, you can kind of see and scroll along with me as I go through this. If you recall, when I embarked on Hugo's Air 2.0, I really wanted to free up...
more time for leisure reading. And in 2024, it does appear that the plan is working because I actually set a new high watermark with 94 books read. Previous was 93 from 2005. So it was a pretty good year for reading for me. I did check, and my page count was higher in 2005. But we don't look at those things. So, you know, my...
My goal for this year, my goal is always to read my age, so it was 52 this year, so I exceeded that by quite a bit. I still did a fair bit of podcast reading. There are actually 21 books that I read for Hugo's and... eight for Take Me to Your Reader. There were a few podcast reads that never came to fruition, but, you know, maybe in a subsequent year, those will result in an actual podcast. By the way, this is Stream of Consciousness and one take, and so...
There will be some awkward pauses and that kind of stuff. Hopefully my dog doesn't start barking. In any case, let's go ahead and look through this. I'll look at the header here real quick. It just says 94 books read, 27,831 pages read. How do you say how many pages you read if you listen to an audiobook? But we won't get into that discussion. Because I did do a fair amount of audiobook listening this year.
I'm going to skip over some of the bigger picture stuff like, you know, what's my most shelved book and least shelved book and that kind of stuff and just go straight down to the list. So if you want to look at that stuff, you can go ahead and click through to the link. All right, down to the list. So the first book that I actually finished in 2024 was Opposable Thumbs, How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever.
by Matt Singer. This was really fascinating, just kind of talking about how these two guys who definitely don't look like maybe they would headline television shows really had a huge impact from starting it. PBS to being this absolute juggernaut and phenomenon was really, really fascinating. And they didn't really like each other very much either. And so kind of seeing their relationship develop through that was really, really interesting.
So it turns out, of course, Neil Gaiman is problematic, as so many people are. His Norse mythology retellings were quite delightful, I have to admit. And I read this before I found out about his recent stuff. I guess it's not recent, it's just coming to light. The Lightning Thief was a reread. This was for Take Me to Your Reader. I think I read the book in print and I listened to the audiobook. I cannot recommend the audiobook version that I read. Really not a good production.
Mr. Adam by Pat Frank. This is an interesting one just because I had never read anything by Pat Frank other than Alas Babylon, which I did. I had a podcast for that in 2024, but I read it in 2023. But I realized that my library had a couple of other Pat Frank... And so I pulled out this one, and this is just, it's one of those books where everybody goes sterile except one person, kind of like Why the Last Man. It was a good read.
Gregory Benford, Timescape. This is one that I actually read for kind of a read-along with the Nebulugo Book Club Discord. If you need a link to that, this is for people who are reading The Hugos and the Nebulas. It's a great... Amen.
community over there. You'll recognize some of the names, JW Vortex over there, Emmanuel Dubois over there, friends of mine. And yeah, good stuff. I don't always keep up with what they're doing there just because I'm reading other stuff. But Timescape was an interesting one. This is one that I took on. audio, and I have an everlasting knit with this one, and it's not even a knit. It's a large problem. You have to get, if you're going to be an audiobook producer, you have to get nerds to read
your science fiction books. Because if I have to constantly listen to an audiobook narrator saying casualty instead of causality, that really gets annoying. That is not the same word. So, yeah. Mickey 7 is a future podcast read because we're going to be covering Mickey 17, the movie by Bong Joon-ho at some point when it comes out this year for Take Me to Your Reader. And yeah, this is a good read. I liked it.
Poor Things could have been a podcast read. We didn't think we'd be able to get Colin to watch this one. So that wasn't the only reason. But it's an interesting movie. It's a fascinating adaptation just because the book... presents more than one point of view, and the movie takes one particular one, and it's not the female character's point of view. And that's an interesting choice. That's worth reading.
I also kind of took this one in this year just because it's a Scottish author and I was going to Scotland. This is the year that I tried to catch up with Invincible, the comics. that go along with the television show. The television show is quite faithful to them, and so you don't need to do both. But I thought it was fun to do. The comics are a lot more PG. They're still very bloody, but there's not nearly as much language in there.
which I'm not sure that even makes sense. A Wrinkle in Time was a double podcast read because we covered this one for Hugo's and also for Take Me to Your Reader. And that was a fun one to revisit. I hadn't read it since, I don't know. High school. The Hobbit was not podcast reading.
Sort of. It kind of was podcast reading because I read it to follow along with somebody else's podcast because former guest Jason Duman started a podcast in which he was trying to indoctrinate his sister to the ways of Lord of the Rings. She was a complete... stranger to it. The podcast is called Hobbit Forming. I have to admit, I suggested the name and I'm still unusually proud of that. So you can find them on Instagram and podcast players. And it's fun to...
to listen along as they go through it. They've moved on at this point to Lord of the Rings. I didn't follow along, but I will at some point, probably. I don't know. I don't really like Lord of the Rings, and so if I'm going to read it, I'm definitely going to take in some podcasts about it as well. Project Hail Mary was a podcast read, and it was a reread. I had listened to it on audio before. This time I read it in print, and it's an excellent book. I liked it a lot.
Likewise, Spaceman of Bohemia. This one was a podcast read, kind of a 50-50 audio. And print, I do that a lot of times where if I might be struggling with a book or just I'm really busy, and so I'll read some of it in print, listen to audiobook, then pick it back up, kind of shift back and forth. Like the WhisperSync thing that happens on Kindle, even if I'm, you know.
In this case, I was reading a print book. More Invincible. I'm not going to comment on every single one of these just because there's a point in the year where I read almost nothing but these. Erasure by Percival Everett. This is actually the book that American fiction was based on. And it's another really interesting adaptation just because you can do different things showing kind of the content of a book.
in a book than you can in a movie. And so this book kind of contains almost the entire story that he's writing when he's trying to write this really hackneyed novel because he realizes this is the stuff that sells. But the movie is excellent, and the book is quite good. The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis. I love Connie Willis, and so this was a fun one.
Definitely not a super significant or important novel, at least in her bibliography. It's not one of the Oxford time travel series that I absolutely love, and I can't wait. I've heard there's another one coming out, and I'm looking forward to that.
Why we love baseball by Joe Penznansky. This is not podcast reading per se, because I just love baseball. And there comes a time in every year where I want to read a baseball book. And I knew this one was coming out. I asked for it for my birthday in 2023.
I read it, and it just happened that I thought, you know what, I'm just going to reach out to Joe and see if he'll come on the podcast. And he did. So it wasn't reading for the podcast, but it ended up sort of being podcast reading. And it's fantastic. You can listen to our episode if you want to know more about that. I bought all three volumes of the Dune...
graphic novel this year. There are, like I said, three volumes of it. I only read one of them. It's quite good. It's not based on the movie in any way. And so things like Liat Kynes is a man in the graphic novel and a woman in the movie. But it's good. And eventually I'll get back to reading the rest of it. Martian Manhunter. I'm an unapologetic DC Comics guy, and I love Martian Manhunter. I always have.
There's not many titles that are dedicated just to him. This one's a little weird because his psyche has been broken up into several parts. And it's kind of fun. I liked it. So more podcast reading. Ian M. Banks, the player of games. I'm grateful to Damo for telling me to read this one first because I had already started reading Consider Phlebus and was really...
bouncing off of Consider Phlebus. The player of games is excellent. There's no way it should work based on what the actual book is, but it succeeds beyond all expectations. And it made it easier for me to then get into Consider Phlebus when I got back to it. Starter Villain by John Scalzi. This is not what I want for my Hugo-nominated fiction. It's a cat book, too, and that's never going to endear it to me just because I'm a dog person. But, yeah.
I don't know why this kind of book gets nominated. I don't know why Kaiju Preservation Society got nominated. These are not important books. They're not the kind of things that we should be nominating for Hugos. So I dislike it the more I think about it. I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads because, you know, it goes down easy. But like I said, it's just, it's not the kind of book that should be honored.
One thing about Invincible, if you notice, if you're following along here, the titles of most of the trades are based on classic sitcoms. So Head of the Class, The Facts of Life, Eight is Enough, which is kind of fun for a Gen Xer because I remember all of these. okay um so we're kind of with starter villain we're into the
Hugo reading for the year. Starterville and I did read in print just because it's quite slight. The Adventures of Amina al-Sarafi, I listened to the audiobook, and it's excellent. This is more what I'm looking for. And this book evokes... Kind of the old Harryhausen movies like Jason and the Argonauts and The Adventures of Sinbad and just some of those old adventuring stories with some modern twists to it. But I really enjoyed this. And this is much more what I'm looking for in...
Hugo-nominated fiction. I'm going to skip down to The Saint of Bright Doors. This is another one. This is one that I definitely bounced off of. I finished it. I finished the audiobook, but I never quite got it. Never really quite got into it. I love the ambition of it. I'm glad that it was nominated for the Hugo, but I...
Didn't really like it. I did rank it above Starter Villain, just because it's the kind of book that I think should be nominated. But it's not something that I really enjoyed. It's on the Nebulas list, so maybe one of these days I'll do an episode on it. Don't really look forward to revisiting it, though. A City on Mars was one of the related work titles, and really enjoyed that. It is a buzzkill. We're probably not going to have A City on Mars, but...
And if we do, it might result in war down here, so that wouldn't be fun. But it's very good. Okay, Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry. This is absolutely my favorite read of the year. It's probably my favorite read. It might be of all time. It is so good. It seems impossible that a book that's a thousand pages long should be such a pleasure for every page.
And it was a good antidote to some of the stuff that I've read for Hugo's where I didn't get a moment's enjoyment out of them. I'm looking at you, Mars trilogy. This one was just like every night I would go down and sit in my chair and... break out this massive book and read a couple of chapters, maybe just one chapter, and just bask in it. And it's so good. I love it. I was very close to just...
finishing the book, and then starting right back at page one. It's just I was in a car at the time that I finished the book, and so I decided not to. But I definitely will revisit it. And, you know, I did an episode on this one. Listen to it. We'll convince you that you should read it.
Okay, some other graphic novels, Batman One Bad Day, Mr. Freeze. There's a whole series of these, actually, that it's kind of based on the killing joke, the idea that what separates a hero from a villain is just one bad day. And yeah, there's a whole series of these for basically Batman's entire rogues gallery. My son really enjoys Mr. Freeze, and he picked this one up, and I ripped it out of his hands and read it. And it's good. So I probably...
At some point, he's going to get the rest of the series, and I'll probably read them. Tim Powers, Declare. This was the book that had the unfortunate distinction of coming right after Lonesome Dove, and basically anything was going to fail by comparison, but Declare. It was a good one. And this was another half-and-half audio and print read. But really interesting. It's a great spy novel combined with a fantasy eldritch horror kind of...
thing that they had going on. It's really, really good. Translation State, this is another one of the Hugo nominees. This is the best audiobook that I listened to this year. The performance, I wish I had written down who the audiobook narrator... was, but she's absolutely phenomenal. Just the variety of accents and characterizations is just unmatched in any audiobook that I've ever listened to. So if you look up the audiobook for this...
Definitely look for other stuff from that narrator because she's really, really good. I've realized that the one thing I like in an audiobook narrator, I like low-voiced women. I think they do a really good job of evoking both men and women where you have kind of the opposite that happens with low voiced men. They have a hard time evoking women. High voiced women have a hard time evoking men. And so I kind of like that.
that middle ground in there. Roadside picnic is another, um, this was another kind of double duty one because I, I think I listened to the audio book for it for my science fiction and translation episode. But then we also covered it for Take Me to Your Reader, because the Science Fiction Film Festival at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry showed Stalker, and so we covered it there. And it's a very interesting novel.
Berserker. So I read a bunch of these, actually, because I had heard that Keanu Reeves was collaborating with China Mieville on a book, which... I did start, but I never finished. But it is set in this universe, and so I wanted to read it. They're extremely bloody, super gory. Interesting stuff. It's essentially an immortal character who can basically regenerate from any injury, even more so than like a Deadpool. Like he could be just a puddle of atoms and he would still regenerate.
So this is one of the ones that got away. I had never read this before. I'd seen the movie a long time ago, but I had planned to do a podcast about this. And the interesting story with this one is I read half of it on the way to Scotland because it's not a very long novel. But when I'm on a plane, I can get...
It's a rare novel that holds my attention the entire time. So I got about halfway through and then switched over to something else. And then I never really got back to it until I got back to the US. And so I picked it up and I was like, now what's happening at this point? And so I picked up the audiobook from my library.
and listened to the entire audiobook. And then I went back and read the last half of the novel. And then there were delays in trying to get the podcast together. And, you know, a couple months went by, and I thought, well, now I'm going to need to...
read it again. So I picked up the audio book again. So this is one that I logged three times this year and we still never did the episode. So maybe one of these days we'll get to it, but I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what happened in it three times in and I'm not completely sure. But I enjoyed it, so it's one of those weird ones. Okay, more Berserker. This actually was like an entry in an anthology, where it seems like it's not set on Earth the way the other ones do.
Some Desperate Glory. So this was my favorite of the Hugo nominees this year. Really, really enjoyed this. Good audiobook. And this is the one that won the Hugo. At some point, I suppose I should do an episode about it, because I didn't record anything about the nominees this year.
Okay, Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days. I think I read this one for science fiction and translation. But then I also was reading it for my episode on Jules Verne with Emmanuel Dubois and Hayley from Hugo Girl. And it's... delightful. It's a great place to start if you want to start with Jules Verne. The Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Yoshiki Tanaka. This is a whole series. I never read the rest of them, but this is...
One originally in Japanese, this is another translated science fiction title, and it's ambitious, I will say that. Solaris by Stanislav Lem. This is another science fiction translation one that has been on my list for a long time. We will definitely cover it at some point for Take Me to Your Reader, but yeah, good stuff. I have no idea what was happening in July, why I read seven...
Invincible volumes. I think I must have been doing my Hugo listening and reading, and so I wanted lighter stuff in the interstitials. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. This is one that I've always really enjoyed the movie, and I found out that there was a series coming out. I think it was on Apple TV. It might have been on Mac. I think it was Apple TV.
I just kind of wanted to see, you know, how different is the movie and the book and their slight differences. I really appreciated the new version because they updated it into the modern era and some of the key plot points in the book. depend on 80s level of forensic science. And so if you're going to update it, you have to make some major changes just because some of the key plot points DNA would have immediately...
identified the person. Where back then, it wasn't that way. Basically, all they had was the blood type in the book, and now they would have DNA. So they had to make some changes, and I appreciated that. More Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, I will warn you, this is to the moon. So if you want to know how they get back from the moon, you have to read the next book in the series. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is probably...
Jules Verne's masterpiece. It's a very good book, very interesting. And yeah, here's the rest of the glut of the Invincible graphic novels. So beyond Band of Brothers, the war memoirs of Major Dick Winters, I'm a huge fan of Band of Brothers and a big admirer of... Dick Winters. And this is the book that distracted me from Annihilation. I started reading it, and this was basically the only thing that I really read in Scotland.
If you like Band of Brothers, this book is an excellent companion to it. It kind of gives some behind-the-scenes about what he was thinking at the time. I also, a long time ago, read Don Malarkey's book, Easy Company Soldier, just because the Oregon connection, because he was from Oregon. RUR by Carol Chapek. This is a classic, just because.
this is where the word robot comes from. And this was probably one of the more fun things that we did for podcasting this year where a local theater was putting on a new production of RUR that stays in the same... time frame so the retro future of of the not not the novel it's a play um but it makes some updates to it because there's a few missteps in the novel or not in the novel sorry i keep saying that in the play um
And yeah, it was really interesting talking to the guy who adapted it. So that's over on Take Me To Reader, if you want that. The Penal Colony, this is the one I will warn people off of, unless you really want to know what the thinking of a straight... white male was in the 80s towards ethnic minorities and gay people. This is a pretty good time capsule of what some of us thought back then. And now looking at it...
And from a 2024, 2025 point of view, I'm like, well, we have come a long way since then, or at least some of us have. But yeah, it's not good. Just watch the movie No Escape. It's good, clean fun. So if you want to know what Seth does to remember what it's like to be a teenager or a preteen even, it's the new Teen Titans. At some point when the Titans showed up on HBO Max, I found that there was a comiXology sale on...
all the trades, all the collected editions of the New Teen Titans. So I bought like five of them. And it's been interesting to kind of go through this and realize, oh, I think I read like one issue from this series. But for the most part, this was all new to me. It's just it was all background to stuff that I was reading at the time. This is something else that I read on the plane. I like to read comics on the plane.
The next volume in the New Teen Titans was where I finally started getting into stuff that I had definitely read before, and so that was kind of fun. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This was a fun audiobook. It's performed by the author, and he does an excellent job. which is not always the case. I'm not a big fan of Mary Robinette's reading. Well, at least her reading of whatever the novel was that was nominated for a Hugo in 2023. I didn't like that one.
Aliens, Tribes. This is like a light novel almost. It's like a novelette slash novella with artwork from Dark Horse Comics. It was really good, and this was for my military science fiction episode, and sort of partially for... my Aliens episode, the bonus episode that I did. World War Robot. This one, does it count as a book? Yes, because Goodreads definitely had it. But it is more of...
a book about art than it is about story. The story part of it is quite light, but it's really cool art, as you can kind of see if you're looking at this. All right, some stuff that I read for the military science fiction episode, Terms of Enlistment and Armor. Armor is a more important novel.
It is something that takes the genre and really does something with it, explores themes and that kind of stuff. In terms of enlistment, if you just want a good, fun military science fiction story that doesn't have a lot behind it, go with this. And at some point, I'll probably check out some of the other volumes in the series, if my library ever gets the audiobooks, because I did enjoy it. It's just... it's not much more than some of its parts where...
armor is. The Killing Star was one that was on William's suggested list from kind of some research that he had done, though he told me he hadn't read it. So I checked it out. It is not military science fiction, but it's an interesting novel, though I don't remember all that much about it. Other than aliens show up and start blowing up everything. And that kind of sounds like it might be in a military science fiction premise, but it's not. Iraq Plus 100, stories from a century after the invasion.
was one that I started listening to. I listened to part of it before I did the science fiction translation episode, and then kind of got away from it and moved on to other stuff. Finally got back to it late in the year, and it's really, really good.
I was looking for novels by Anthony Johnston in my library catalog and discovered that he had a graphic novel called The Fuse, and the first volume was called The Russia Shift. So I checked that out. It's interesting. I'm probably not going to continue the series. But I enjoyed it. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Naylor. This is a novella, but it's very good. I really enjoyed it. Just kind of talking about, like, what does it mean if we try and bring back species on extinction?
The Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual is so much fun for somebody who is a huge fan of Aliens, which I am. It's very wordy. It's very dry in places, but it's worth having if you're a huge fan of the movie. The Half-Life of Facts. So this was a nonfiction audiobook that I checked out. Just, I mean, the subtitle is Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. And it just kind of talks about the way things move on as we advance our knowledge. And that can be...
troubling for people, you know, trying to say trust the science, right? I still say trust the science because science is self-correcting over time. But it also means that at some point we're wrong about things. It's just a matter of the scale of the wrongness. That's really the question. I have the space trilogy on here, Out of the Silent Planet, Paralander of That Hideous Strength. That was my most recent episode, the one that I started the year with.
I enjoy these books. They're interesting time capsules and definitely books that I think somebody who's a religious believer is going to get more out of than somebody who's not. Speaking of which, the Common English Bible, I have no idea why this... Image is broken in the list here. Maybe they'll get it fixed by next year. This is supposed to be a very readable Bible. I can confirm. I've read it the last two years. I'm reading it again this year. You know, it's enjoyable stuff.
It doesn't sound as Bible-y as some other editions. And those of you who have read the whole Bible will probably understand what I mean by that. And those of you who haven't are like, what do you mean, Bible-y? Think of King James sounds Bible-y. But this reads not like a novel, but just a lot more standard American English. Nuclear war scenario. This one was terrifying. This is essentially a minute-by-minute...
breakdown of what would happen if North Korea launched a missile. And it does not take very long for everything to really go to hell. So this isn't a good idea. We should not have nuclear war. All right. I got to hurry because I know my son's on the way home. Batman Hush. This was one that I read. My son's a huge fan of the Batman. And he had heard that Hush might be involved with the sequel.
The Hunt for Red October, if you've listened to Take Me to Your Reader, you know that we did a really fun episode where we recorded on a submarine. That was a ton of fun. Anthony Johnston, I was looking for the dog sitter detective when I found The Fuse. It's a fun, the cat book that I referenced earlier. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I bounced off of a little bit. I did finish it, but it didn't totally work for me. It evoked Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, but I'm not totally sure it worked for me. A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg was another Nebulugo one. It's really interesting, although he seems to have this corollary to save the cat, you know, that whole thing to make people like your main character. But in his case, it's talk about how well endowed he is, but also what a bad lover he is.
over and over and over and over. Not sure why that was a thing. Mouse, The Complete Mouse by Art Spiegelman. This is a graphic novel. It's more graphic nonfiction, but this is, I think, the only graphic. winner of the Pulitzer, and it's very good. I read the first two volumes of the Westmark trilogy, Westmark and The Kestrel. These are things that I had not read Westmark since junior high, and I had never read The Kestrel. And so I'm going to continue reading with The Beggar Queen in this year.
And I really enjoy them. So if you're a fan of the Perdane books, these are a little older in terms of some of the content in it would be tougher for... you know, grade schoolers, but middle school and above, definitely. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I really loved this one, and it is a hard novel. Really, really tough stuff happens in it, but I thought it was excellent. Excellent in its kind of depiction of doubt as a religious person who is very comfortable with doubt.
It really worked for me. Really, really enjoyed it. Even though, like I said, there's a reason why when Hugo Girl did this one, their episode title was Trigger Warning, because it is tough. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I realized I hadn't read anything by John Wyndham other than The Day of the Triffids, which I love. The Chrysalids is so good. And it's very short. But it feels like a novel that could have been written 10 years ago. And it was written in the 50s. And that is an accomplishment.
Almost down to the end here, Superman Birthright. This was a recommendation that Michael had on our Superman episode, and it's very good. He was right to recommend it. I like it a lot. And then Children of God by Mary DeRio Russell. This is the second book. the sequel to The Sparrow. I didn't like it as much. This one was actually award-nominated, but I don't feel like it played fair. There's a point in there where there's some changes made to what we know happened in the previous book.
quote, no. And like I said, I'm not sure it plays fair with the reader. But if you want a more tied up in a bow ending that's not quite so dour, this is a good choice. All right, so that is it. I think Blindness I also read this year, and I don't know why it is not on this list. I checked. I made sure that I logged it correctly. But I did an episode on that one with Andy Perry, and it's very good. One of my favorite books.
Okay, I think that's going to do it. So in terms of my favorites, my favorite was definitely Lonesome Dove. My least favorite was probably Penal Colony with a close second place of starter villain. for different reasons. One, I didn't like the book because of the content of it, and the other one, I didn't like it because it was an award nominee and shouldn't have been. So let me know what were your favorite reads of 2024, and if...
we had any crossover. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. I'll talk to you next time.