Luke Muehlhauser

Best and favorite “books” as of the end of 2024

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Since I began reading fiction again in late 2023 (in my late 30s, after a >15yr hiatus from fiction), I’ve been tracking my reading on Goodreads, and rating works I finish 1-5 stars based on pure enjoyment rather than e.g. artistic merit. I’ve now finished reading 151 “books” (including e.g. short stories), all but 8 of those in 2024, with an average work length of 425 pages. (Counting “books read this year” with no mention of pages is strange to me, since books vary enormously in length. E.g. Goodreads says the shortest “book” I read in 2024 was 3 pages, and the longest was 2184 pages.) My reading rate was surprisingly steady in 2024: I read between 4500 and 5800 pages each month, without exception.

Of works I’ve finished (151) or DNF’d (quit; 80), I rated only 5% (13 total) of those 5 stars. But I expect the “favorite” and “best” lists below to change significantly from year to year, as I’ve read very few books so far.1

Favorite works

Below are the 5-star works I most enjoyed so far. When multiple works are from the same author and I enjoyed them similarly, I combine them into one item.

  1. Project Hail Mary
  2. Lonesome Dove
  3. The Pillars of the Earth
  4. Last Argument of Kings, Before They Are Hanged, Best Served Cold, Red Country, The Heroes
  5. Kindred

Other 5-star books: Of Mice and Men, The Paper Menagerie, Stoner, World Without End.

Best 5-star works

Here are the works I enjoyed at a 5-star level that I’d rate highest for “aesthetic value” or “artistic merit” or something like that:

  1. Lonesome Dove
  2. Stoner
  3. Of Mice and Men
  4. The Heroes

There are some novels I’ve read or DNF’d that might be as good (on “artistic merit”) as some of those listed above, but I didn’t also enjoy them at the 5-star level — e.g. possibly The Sound and the Fury, The Master and Margarita, The Grapes of Wrath, Lolita, or A Confederacy of Dunces.

Favorite authors

To calculate my favorite authors, I’ll award each author 1 point for each page in a 4.5-star work,2 and 2 points for each page in a 5-star work.3 By that metric (calculations here), my favorite authors to date are:

  1. Joe Abercrombie (5637 points across 6 works)
  2. Ken Follett (4426 points across 2 works)
  3. Larry McMurtry (2467 points across 2 works)
  4. Brandon Sanderson (2095 points across 2 works)

Commentary

  • Some works are hard to classify by genre, but I’ll say 6 of my five-star reads are primarily historical fiction, 5 are primarily fantasy, 1 is primarily science fiction, and 1 I’ll call “other.”
  • I generally prefer genre/commercial fiction to literary fiction. Only one of my 5-star reads has the “literary fiction” tag on Goodreads (Stoner).
  • The oldest 5-star fiction work I’ve read is Of Mice and Men (1937), the shortest is The Paper Menagerie (32 pages), and the longest is World Without End (1237 pages).
  • It’s interesting that Project Hail Mary is my favorite novel, and it was only the 5th novel I read as an adult. When will I find something I like even more? Or, is this an artifact of my being easier to thrill and impress back when I had read almost nothing?
  1. My TBR (to be read) list is >3800 items long, and that’s only counting one work per series for books in a series. To give you a sense of how little I’ve read, some famous authors I haven’t yet tried at all (as an adult) include the Brontës, Shakespeare, Mann, and Dumas. Even within my favorite genres (fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction), I haven’t yet tried (as an adult): JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, GRR Martin, Steven Erikson, Anne Rice, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Jules Verne, William Gibson, Michael Crichton, Liu Cixin, Hilary Mantel, Colleen McCullough, Bernard Cornwell, James Clavell, Edward Rutherfurd, or Patrick O’Brian. [↩]
  2. Annoyingly, Goodreads doesn’t allow scoring with half-points, but I have written “4.5 stars” in the Goodreads review of each book I’m rating 4.5 stars. [↩]
  3. For page counts, I use figures from Goodreads. [↩]