The global party that is New Year’s is my favorite holiday each year. It’s the one time that everyone around the globe has to bow to the flipping over of the calendar and begin counting days again.

It’s a good time to look ahead and think about 2025 (so much work to do, folks) and post the obligatory glance back on our reading and books of 2024.

Looking ahead into 2025, I am halfway through Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart coming out in January. While reinforcing a lot of what folks in Gen X can probably sense, Superbloom is doing a good job of mapping out the ‘why/how’ all the silos on all the social media platforms occur. It’s not by accident. I’m curious to see how Carr wraps this one up. A very worthwhile read so far. I’ll also finish up the Booker-wining Orbital today or tomorrow. The writing is very good, but I am reminded how much I enjoy having quote marks in novels as this one does not use them.

Looking back on 2024, one of my favorite reads was Warren Tryon’s 1963 book about the birth of American publishing in Boston titled Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields. Ticknor & Fields was a publisher I was familiar with, but all of the backstory and European crossover were fascinating. 

The original building of Ticknor’s Old Bookstore on the Corner is still standing, but as I discovered… it’s a Chipotle now. 

Out of the 31 books I read last year, the other highlights were:

Autocracy, Inc., The Literary Decade, Lost in Thought, The Upstairs Delicatessen, This Is What It Sounds Like, and Jason Guriel’s On Browsing.

LibraryThing tells me that I read more than 8,000 pages in 2024, that my books had more covers with predominantly black-and-white elements, and that more of them had a BISAC listing in the Biography & Memoir bucket, with History close behind. LibraryThing has also been measuring my books in badgers, giraffes, and units of Tim Spalding for years. It’s fun.

So, Happy New Year to you! I hope you have had some worthwhile reads over the past year and are already planning which spines to crack starting tomorrow. I have a feeling we’re all going to need our books to make it through what lies ahead. Maybe we can all get together and get more folks reading in 2025.

Cheers!