2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)

In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. 

My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).

When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work. 

I reviewed three novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first: Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York, and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. And I also read and blogged about two pieces of nineteenth-century French fiction in translation: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert, and The Animal, Rachilde. 

My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park). 

Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023. 

In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends. 

What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Review: Stranger in the Shogun’s City, A Japanese Woman and Her World, Amy Stanley (2020)

I know very little about nineteenth-century Japan, but I strongly identified with non-fiction writer Amy Stanley’s author note in her 2020 biography, Stranger in the Shogun’s City. Stanley writes about her excitement at uncovering the story of Tsuneno, a woman born in the early years of the nineteenth-century, through letters and other family records. As a writer of historical fiction, I too have felt that thrill of looking through an unexpected window into the past, when an ordinary person, not one of history’s great names, becomes real to you. It’s hard to know why particular people from the past are so compelling to us. But it made perfect sense to me that Stanley spent years of her life painstakingly uncovering what is knowable about Tsuneno and her family.

When I write that Tsuneno was “ordinary,” I don’t mean to suggest that she was boring. She married (and divorced!) several times—something that would have been unthinkable to many of her European contemporaries. She fled her family to move to the big city, Edo—now part of Tokyo. And, as far as her brother was concerned, she was a problem. She was independent, strong-willed, and opinionated, i.e., she possessed exactly the same traits as most heroines in historical fiction. 

But Tsuneno was not a political actor on a global stage. Historical shifts—in Japan’s governance, economy, and relationship with the outside world—shaped her life, rather than the reverse. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is more about transporting us back to Edo, a city that no longer exists, than bringing us into Tsuneno’s psyche, which outside of fictionalization is unknowable to us. As a novelist, I couldn’t help but wonder if Stanley had ever considered turning Tsuneno into a character. Did she have a sense of what she might have said, felt, and thought, beyond the letters that the records have left us?

I think it’s notable that some of the reviews of the book that I read online, and even the biography’s Wikipedia page, don’t mention its subject’s name. Yes, Tsuneno’s life acts as an effective vehicle for transporting us to nineteenth-century Japan, but I hope I remember her—not just the lost world she inhabited.

What book with a nineteenth-century link would you like me to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want reviews, writing advice and more, delivered to your inbox once a month? Subscribe to my email newsletter here.