Each year I rate each book according to my assessment of its quality and my level of enjoyment. The three best books I read in a year are the ones that have the highest combined rating of quality and enjoyment. This year, these three were as follows:

  1. A House for Mr. Biswas

A House for Mr. Biswas essentially revisits the plot of his first novel, Mystic Masseur. By the time he writes A House for Mr. Biswas, however, Naipaul has completely found his voice, and so the retelling is more similar to the majority of his work, that is, rather introspective and bleak. Its strength, beyond the impeccable prose, is in its veracity; Naipaul is writing what he knows. The best fiction usually mixes with autobiography, but unlike autobiographies, the fiction writer can plumb the emotional insecurities, deep longings, and frustrations with complete candour.

  1. The Promise

A personally relevant book for me in that it describes the opportunities and challenges that religious people have living in a secular world. And the same praise I had for Mr. Biswas holds true with The Promise; Potok writes what he knows, as a believing Jew living in New York City, navigating between liberal and orthodox approaches to Judaism.

  1. The Gnostic Gospels

I wrote a whole review of this book earlier this year (see here). Not only did I learn a lot about Gnosticism as a movement, but it also helped me better contextualize the incredibly diverse state of early Christianity. It also has a lot of parallels with Latter-day Saint doctrine, so it’s interesting to consider from that perspective too.

Now on to the stats!

This year arrested a three year decline, and more than doubled the amount of books I read from the year before. It nearly tied the most books I have ever read in a year (in 2018). What do those two years (2018 & 2024) have in common? I spent them in Morocco (Peace Corps & Fulbright). It’s a lot easier to read more when you have more time.

The thing I like about keeping track of my enjoyment is to see if I can figure out which types of books I enjoy. Below I consider year of publication and genre to see if any preferences emerge.

Essentially no relationship between year of publication and my self-rating of enjoyment. I marginally enjoy older books though.1 I suspect this is mostly driven by the fact that there are very few duds that manage to last more than a few decades, so every book I’m reading that’s over a century old is bound to be a classic.

How about genre?

Not much of a range in terms of enjoying the various genres. The size of the dots correspond to the number of books I have read within that genre. General fiction is the thing I read the most.

And to end, a list of the books I read this year (in order of reading) and how much I enjoyed each one:

Title Author Level_of_Enjoyment
The Gift of Asher Lev Chaim Potok 8.75
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wished You a Happy Birthday Neil Macfarquhar 7.00
Lives of the Monster Dogs Kirsten Bakis 8.75
The Silk Roads Peter Frankopan 8.75
The Promise Chaim Potok 9.75
A House for Mr. Biswas V.S. Naipaul 9.75
Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut 8.00
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan Aldous Huxley 9.50
City Clifford Simak 9.00
The Chosen Chaim Potok 9.00
The Complete Calvin & Hobbes Bill Watterson 8.50
The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis 7.50
The Last Temptation of Christ Nikos Kazantzakis 9.00
Davita’s Harp Chaim Potok 8.75
Half a Life V.S. Naipaul 8.00
Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis 8.00
Dune Frank Herbert 8.00
Dune Messiah Frank Herbert 7.00
A Way in the World V.S. Naipaul 8.75
The Stories of Paul Bowles Paul Bowels 9.00
The Gnostic Gospels Elaine Pagels 9.75
Without Stopping Days Paul Bowels 9.00
The Almoravids and the Meanings of Jihad Ronald Messier 6.75
Days Paul Bowels 8.75
Hyperion Dan Simmons 8.50
Homage to Catalonia George Orwell 8.00
Favoured Bethan Owen NA
On Democracy Robert Dahl 6.75
Conversations with Paul Bowels Paul Bowels 8.25
The Moors in Spain and Portugal Jan Read 7.00
Collected Stories Mohammed Mrabet 6.75
The Will of the Wanderer Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 9.00
Paladin of the Night Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.75
A History of God Karen Armstrong 7.00
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory Tim Alberta 7.75
The Prophet of Akhran Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.00
Vulture Girl Bethan Owen NA
Dragons of Autumn Twilight Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.75
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 7.00
Eric Terry Pratchett 8.00
Dragons of Winter Night Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 8.25
Dragons of Spring Dawning Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.50
Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 9.25
The French Sanche de Gramont 8.00
Blackness in Morocco Cynthia Becker 8.00
The Fall of Hyperion Dan Simmons 7.75
Room with a View E.M. Forster 8.75
Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 7.75
Numero Zero Umberto Eco 7.75
Disgrace J.M. Coetzee 8.50
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 9.00
Hideous Kinky Esther Freud 7.00
Howard’s End E.M. Forster 9.00
The Longest Journey E.M. Forster 8.00
Truckers Terry Pratchett 9.00
Farmer Giles of Ham J.R.R. Tolkien 9.00
Time of the Twins Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.50
War of the Twins Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.00
Test of the Twins Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman 7.00
Adolescence in a Moroccan Town Susan and Douglas Davis 7.75

  1. Just by way of explanation, the scatter plots I’m showing comes with a regression line plotted using a basic bivariate ordinary least squares regression. That line is a line of best fit; it tries to predict the relationship between the two variables (shown on the Y and X axes). I’m not going to be tedious and present the regression table (this is for fun!), but you can just eyeball the relationships or simply look at the regression line. A negative relationship will be shown as the line sloping down from left to right, and a positive relationship will slope up from left to right. The steeper the slope, the more correlated the variables. In the case of the scatter plot above, the modest slope indicates that the two variables are not well-correlated.↩︎