My Favorite Books and Audiobooks of 2024 (Premium)

I was never an honor student, and like many with ADHD, I simply sailed through life, giving little thought or effort to those topics that didn't interest me. But as an avid reader from a young age, I took part in an accelerated English program in the sixth grade that met once a week before the school day started. It was organized and led by Jean Roberts, the first of several teachers who influenced me greatly, and over the course of the school year, we read, in turn, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Odyssey by Homer, and Beowulf.

And with that, I was off to the races. Or, at least, off to the library and, as I got older, the bookstore. I have so many memories of books and other content I've read, and I've told some of those stories--including this past year in Re-readable (Premium)--here on Thurrott.com and elsewhere. But there is always more. Reading, in many ways, has been a life-long obsession. Almost every night, I try to squeeze in more time for reading before going to bed, only to succumb to sleep mid-sentence. And then I wake up, make coffee, and begin reading again. Reading literally bookends my days.

Reading is both easier and harder than it was when I was in the sixth grade.

I started reading the newspaper very early in life, starting with the comics but quickly graduating to the sports and news, and if I had nothing to read, I would slum it out with the side of a cereal box or whatever else was at hand. But thanks to technology, I now have a library of almost 1,000 books in Kindle, plus over 300 audiobooks in Audible, and a nearly infinite collection of content to read online thanks to various apps, feeds, and other services. I rarely have nothing to read, thanks to my phones, tablets, computers, and other devices. But I also worry deeply about the mind-altering dumbness that seems to accompany the rapid-fire content explosion we've experienced during this era. I sometimes have to force myself to read longer works--big books like the aforementioned The Lord of the Rings or Stephen King's The Stand, perhaps--as a sort of mental workout. Technology giveth and technology taketh away, it seems.

Reading is also both the same as and different from it was when I was younger. I still read a mix of non-fiction and fiction, for example, though that mix is skewed much more heavily toward non-fiction now. I was always fascinated with history, and I recall that recent history would unroll in stages, where news would occur in real-time on the TV--locally and then via CNN and other cable networks--before getting a more in-depth treatment in the newspaper the next morning and in magazines in the following days or weeks. If a story was important enough, it might later be told in even greater detail in a book. Today, everything seems to happen almost in real-time, and what we used to call the fog of war has devolved into misinformation, sometimes inadvertently but more recently, and tragically...