This is my third annual book and video report after sharing my reads in 2022 and my reads and watches in 2023. I also still have old book recommendations preserved on seven blog pages, but those haven’t been updated in years. I continue to track my reading at LibraryThing. While my reading is also logged at GoodReads, my Read list there is inaccurate, and I dislike the GoodReads interface too much to properly curate its records.

Book Tech

I read about 30 books in 2024, almost as many as I finished in 2023. 65% of those were Kindle ebooks, 25% were Audible audiobooks, and 10% were hardback books.

As I compose this post, I’ve read Kindle books for 16 weeks in a row, although I had a far longer Kindle streak of 98 weeks from November 2018 to September 2020, maintained after March 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will note that although I’ve had a Kindle since 2008, Amazon doesn’t show statistics before August 2018.

I had used seven models of Kindles over the past 16 years, and I took advantage of a Black Friday sale to purchase my eighth: a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition. I never liked the uneven thickness of my 2019 Kindle Oasis, although I appreciated its physical page buttons when I was reading outside on a patio swing in cold weather and wearing gloves. I usually fell back to using my 2014 Kindle Voyage, but after a decade of use the battery life on it had declined enough to annoy me.

Thus I bought the Kindle Paperwhite 6 Signature Edition, which is the 12th generation of the Amazon e-reader. Amazon no longer sells any e-ink reader with physical page buttons, but happily I find that I can still adequately advance the pages of my new Paperwhite when wearing my Sonoran Merino wool gloves with SilverSync Touch fingers — they have conductive silver fibers to allow touchscreen interactions.

One issue I faced with the upgrade, however, was getting a Kindle case. Since 2010 I had carried most of my previous Kindles in a soft case from BUILT. It was too narrow for the Oasis, but I would just take the Voyage on my escapades. However, now the Voyage was dying and both the Oasis and the new Paperwhite wouldn’t fit. I was a bit leery of purchasing an Amazon case, since their case kept crashing my Kindle 3 back in 2010. Frankly, they’ve never been particularly adept at hardware design.

I couldn’t find a wider form of the vintage BUILT case, so I reluctantly ordered a Kindle Colorsoft case. I am pleased to report that I find it comfortable to use, and I like how the Kindle sleeps and awakens when you close or open the case.

As for physical books, one was required reading for my job and was purchased for me. Another was about a photographer, and while I don’t mind reading comics with the Kindle app on an iPad, a Kindle’s e-ink is still marginal for photographs. Another book was a 1978 biography that simply was not available as an electronic book, so I ordered a used hardback for $29 with tax.

Book Reviews

My favorite book overall in 2024 was Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny by Ann Marks. I read it shortly after finishing Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, which may be the first time I’ve read two biographies of the same person in succession. It was a beautifully written and well-researched look at a complicated and talented woman whose work did not find acclaim until its serendipitous discovery in a storage locker sale, and it included many of her photographs. The Finding Vivian Maier documentary is also quite good.

My favorite audiobook in 2024 was The Bullet That Missed, the third in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. He has published four of them thus far, with a fifth promised for September 2025. I have loved that series so much that I deliberately save them up to enjoy one per year. Their plots are less important to me than the poignant characterizations of the aging heroes and villains.

I often find multiple narrators a bit gimmicky, but they were used to decent effect in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility with different narrators for its timeframes of 1912, 2020, 2203, and 2401. I found the plot clumsy, but I enjoyed the book’s atmospherics.

A far more skillful and moving work was Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward, which has melancholic existential staying power. Far more lively was Ken Follett’s lengthy The Evening and the Morning, book four in his Kingsbridge series, which offered another well-researched glimpse of long-ago life in England. That sucker was over 24 hours long, and I don’t speed-read audiobooks, but it was worth the investment.

I didn’t seek out any classics this year, other than to finally finish Pinocchio 50 years after starting it. But I did read some old works, including the final manuscript of Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger from 1908. It was a strange book and my least favorite of the ten Sam Clemens books that I’ve read. Thus far, I prefer his non-fiction travelogues and reminiscences to his fiction novels.

Other old works I enjoyed this year were two fantasy novels by Abraham Merritt. I first read 1924’s The Ship of Ishtar, and followed that with 1919’s The Moon Pool. I liked them both, but I’d recommend the ship over the pool. I’ve downloaded a couple more of his works in my Kindle for future reading.

I listened to Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Great Mistake from 1940, but it was far less memorable than her mysteries The After House of 1914, The Window at the White Cat of 1910, or her comedic Where There’s a Will in 1912. Another mystery author I happily returned to was Edith Pargeter, writing as Ellis Peters, with 1959’s Death Mask and Never Pick Up Hitch-Hikers! from 1976.

I decided to seek out another mystery author with a long series, so I read the first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Velvet Claws from 1936. I watched some of the episodes of the old television show years ago; here is a great example. While I had heard of Erle Stanley Gardner, I did not know he had been a self-proclaimed fiction factory who authored at least 140 books with about 100 million sales.

The book was not what I had expected, with a gritty tone and no court appearances. Upon discovering that Gardner had been the best-selling American author of the 20th century at the time of his death in 1970, I decided to read a biography. That meant purchasing a used hardback of Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, which I found fairly interesting. I have Perry Mason #2, The Case of the Sulky Girl, downloaded into my Kindle for a future read, and I will likely sample the first in the Cool and Lam series he published using the pen name of A. A. Fair.

I also revisited another favorite author, who helped me endure the darkest days of COVID-19: P.G. Wodehouse. Service with a Smile was the eighth full-length novel set at Blandings Castle. I’m parceling those books out as well, with only two finished novels left to go, plus one unfinished work. I plan to finish that series before sampling a Jeeves and Wooster novel.

I’m currently reading 1944’s Rim of the Pit, one of only two published novels by Henning Nelms, writing as Hake Talbot. It is lauded as the second-best locked room mystery of all time, after John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man. TomCat wrote a great review of the Talbot book, and Curtis Evans provided a nice biographical article on Nelms. I especially enjoyed how Hake Talbot introduced one of the characters in Rim of the Pit:

Her face still showed traces of a beauty which must have been flamboyant in her youth, but she had fought age with the wrong weapons. The implausible black of her hair made her look five years older than she was.

I’m generally unimpressed by depictions of the supernatural, but the hysterics of a spirit supposedly contacted via a dark séance were striking:

“Imbecile!” Désanat’s voice rose to a shriek. “You dabble in mysteries you are not able to comprehend, like a child playing on the rim of a volcano. Imbecile, like the child, to think that which lies dormant cannot engulf you.”

My most disappointing read of 2024 was my attempt at Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld Saga. I finished To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which had a fascinating premise but uneven execution, but I abandoned The Fabulous Riverboat mid-stream. I read about half of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, and I listened to Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America and Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, which helped delineate the origins of some of our problems, which seem unlikely to be solved anytime soon.

I don’t read many comic books, but I enjoyed Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith, although it would have benefited from a harsher edit. I got a kick out of the 12-part Batman ’66 Meets the Green Hornet series by Kevin Smith, Ralph Garman, and Ty Templeton. I particularly enjoyed the dark and deep My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, with Part 2 finally released seven years after Part 1. Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings was a bizarre work.

Videos

I’m currently supporting eight creators via Patreon, having dropped three of my 2023 memberships and added Asianometry. You can see my 2023 post for links to my favorite video creators; I’ll just highlight a new discovery here.

Recently I stumbled onto Perf Damage, with the wife-and-husband team Charlotte and Adam Barker. She is the Director of Film Preservation for Paramount, and he is a camera utility for the Jimmy Kimmel show. They are movie fanatics who watch double features all the time. I loved their look back at The Lydeckers, who did practical effects for the old Republic pictures, and Natalie Kalmus, the infamous Technicolor consultant.

Their videos were so good that I wanted to listen to several of their older podcasts, but I found that most of the links were broken. Happily, the ones at Spotify still work, which was the first time I’ve ever used that service. I especially enjoyed their two episodes on William Castle: his early years from 1914-1958 and his later years from 1959-1977. I also recommend H for Horrific. If you get interested in their work, there is a great interview with Charlotte by Cereal at Midnight.