13 Novels I Read in 2024 (and 1 I've Started in 2025)

A review of my first year of regular novel reading in a decade

2024 was the year I got back into novels.

Ever since graduating a decade ago last summer (and despite the fact I did so with an English degree) I’ve never been in the habit of regular novel reading. Unlike a lot of people, my degree didn’t put me off novels—in fact a number that I read and studied closely in my final year (The Quiet American by Graham Greene, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood) remain real favourites. Even the novel I wrote my dissertation on remains my all-time favourite, as it was beforehand: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (on whom more later). I think that, rather, post-university, I got seriously into non-fiction reading in my early-to-mid twenties (something I’d never done as a teenager) and then very much into poetry in my late twenties and early thirties.

But last year I decided it was time to get back to it.

This was helped partly by the necessities of my schedule. Flexing my work around other commitments, I tend to work very long days and into the evenings on Mondays and Tuesdays, and need an extended screen-free time to purge all the blue light from my system before bed. And so Monday and Tuesday became bath nights, and bath time became reading time. This was actually the resurrection of an old habit from the heady days of the first COVID lockdown, when I was stuck at home all day with an 18 month old whilst my wife lay bed-bound for 3 weeks suffering hyperemesis whilst pregnant with our second child. In order to firmly draw a line under days which all blurred into one, I obsessively bathed by candlelight every evening just to have a clear marker that there was evening and there was morning. I read and reread a lot of T.S. Eliot. It was a strange time in my life.

And so here are the thirteen novels I read in 2024, with some reflections on each, and a glimpse of my first novel of 2025.