The 24 Books I'm Most Excited to Read in 2024
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2025
- What Book Are You Most Excited to Read in 2024?
New Reading Challenge Video Coming Soon!
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Robin @bookspin
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the Hemingway House is in Key West. Beautiful place. The many descendants of his beloved cats roam the grounds.
On my bucket list :)
“The Stars My Destination” is a wild ride! Alfred Bester is a terrific writer. I just finished “The Demolished Man” and liked it just as much.
I came here specifically to rave about this one
Vonnegut, Reynolds, and PKD are 3 of my favourite authors, and Roadside Picnic is great too!
Doors of Eden, Blood Music, Dawn, and I Am Legend are also on my TBR so I’m looking forward to those!
Maybe we'll have some overlap this year. I'm reading Blood Music right now and it's really easy to get into
The worst thing about the stars my destination is that once you read it, you can’t read it for the first time again. It is one of the books that I had the most fun with last year and it was among my 2023 top 10 favorites. I read it earlier in the year and every time I think about it I smirk. Also Dawn is fantastic, finished that one just 2 weeks ago. And I am legend
Is well, a legend. Be prepared for some manic depressive vibes but I enjoyed so much the intensity that Richard Matheson brings to that story. Dracula will not disappoint, a true classic horror! Great list!
Matheson definitely seems to bring the intensity and manic depression doesn't surprise me. Thanks for all the glowing endorsements :)
When you read The Waste Land, have Coles Notes (or whatever Americans/Canadians call them) at hand. It will appear to mean nothing and be all over the place. But Notes will explain what Eliot is doing and what his sources are. It's extraordinarily clever and mind-blowingly dense, but not easy to understand on its face. I studied it at 18 and a lot of it has stayed with me for decades. Good teaching helped. I hope you get to enjoy it.
Cliffnotes?
That's the one! As a Brit we didn't have those, when I was young enough to be a student. Coles Notes or York Notes.
Guess it's pretty cryptic then? I'm interested to see what I make of it unguided but thanks for the tip. I'll seek help if I get lost
Let out with a great "YES!" when you pulled out Roadside Picnic. Great list. You might watch Tarkovsky's Stalker after reading Roadside Picnic.
I played the video game long ago
@@bookjack my turn to learn something.
I think Muffin likes to read the kitty food packages 😸
I read Frankenstein and Dracula last fall, definitely perfect autumnal reads!
I started Crime and Punishment earlier this month. It's not a cheery book, but the characters are fantastic.
Several of the others are still on my radar or already in my TBR.
Good to know. Figured it wouldn't be sunshine and rainbows
I re-read The Stars My Destination just last week, having read it multiple times over 40 years ago. Bizarrely, I remembered almost none of it. What it has is pace, imagination, good characterisation ... I'm not so sure that these days it would get the rubric 'masterpiece' so often, but in its time, yes. Certainly as a late teenager I was wowed. Good luck with it. You won't dislike it!
Bester’s villains are so awful and colorful you can’t help but root for them a little.
I am in the exact same boat as you with Herbert's Dune! I will absolutely get it read this year. I tried about 15 years ago, and couldn't get past 50 pages or so, but I was a different reader then.
Great video!
I was also a very different reader back when I tried, but we will both conquer Dune this year!
Crime & Punishment also on my TBR.
Ditto. I read some of it many years ago but I don’t even think I hit the halfway mark. Hoping to try again this year, and finish the job this time 😊
@@BookBlather nice! hope we can both get to it this year. ☺
The Doors of Eden: very good.
Save Cemetery World, Dawn and Roadside Picnic for your 2057 TBR.
Co-review with Mrs.Bookjack !!
Hey 👋 be careful of those forwards- esp the one in roadside picnic. Maybe read it after u start the book. Also i’m soooo excited to hear your thoughts on dawn by butler! You look to be for a great year. (Hope ur wife makes that star appearance). Cheers!
Thanks for the heads up. I probably won't risk it, but I was looking forward to LeGuin hyping it up for me. Oh well I'd rather not be spoiled
I'm wondering if you did a video on Parable of the Sower/Talents
Read Dandelion Wine in the summer. Nice time capsule read. I am Legend is a lot of fun too. In the early 2000s, Bruce Willis was attached to a Black List script for I am Legend adaptation which had a great idea for an opening scene.
I just got The Waste Land by TS Eliot. A book I recently finished had several quotes/passages from The Waste Land, so I just had to get a copy!
I hope you enjoy "The Glass Hotel" as much as I did. I loved it.
This is the first opinion I've heard of the book. Hope I love it too
@@bookjack I can't wait to hear what you think. I don't remember anything especially scifi about it at all. Just a great novel
Nice.. I just got Dune and plan to read this year too.
Lots of hype behind that one. Hope it holds up
I read Crime and Punishment last year, it was one of my White Wales.
Very glad I followed thru and completed it, and I understand now why it is considered a masterpiece of the classics.
Be prepared; it put me in a reading slump afterwards. The experience literally drained part of me.
Thanks for the heads up. I know the feeling you're describing
Hey Jack. Poseidon's Wake is the 3rd book in a trilogy, kinda afro-futurist, there are elephaaaants in spaaaace. Probably not his strongest work and you should really read the two books that come before this one first. Having said that, it is set quite a bit after the other two and can maybe be read on its own. Good luck with your target list!
Oh good to know thanks Jon. Any that you would recommend for a first read?
@bookjack House of Suns is great. Century Rain is meant to be good, haven't read it yet. Both standalones. Revelation Space is awesome, the Prefect books also good. The Revenger books are YA but a good read too.
Glad you picked Galapagos! It's seriously weird, seriously witty. I'm tempted to give it a re-read. Also, Trigger Warning is an enjoyable read. My favourite story in the collection is the novella 'Black Dog', set in the American Gods universe.
You're right about Roadside Picnic's almost universal praise - I hope to get to that one this year too.
I loved American Gods so looking forward to that one. Thanks again Robin :)
Hey cool I have A Maze of Death and White Noise on my tbr as well! :D And Roadside Picnic is a pretty nifty read. ;)
I'm curious about White Noise. Seems like it could be incredibly topical
Bester's and Dandelion Wine (totally a summer read, YES), beautiful picks. Man, you keep reminding me I’m in debt with Vonnegut. This is the year I fix _that_, goddamnit.
Do you have one in mind that you'd like to read?
@@bookjack You mean Vonnegut's? The only one I own is a meta one, "Pity the Reader" I believe is the English title, I have a Spanish edition. But I feel like that's not a good start. I forgot already which one you ranked first in your 2023 list? Cat's Cradle? I try to read as much as I can in the original language, but some authors just kick my butt (Pynchon, I'm talking to you). I'm hoping Vonnegut is not one of those...
Sirens of Titan. Vonnegut's writing is really smooth I think but sometimes it's hard to figure out what he's talking about
You have of my favorites in that list (I Am Legend, Stars My Destinstion, and Roadside Picnic).
Hope you have a great year my man
Thanks. Hope you have a good one too :)
Great TBR! I could add nearly every one to my tbr. Last year, I was happy to have read The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolf. This year I would like to make more progress with The Wheel of Time. I have only reached book 3 so far.
If I had a copy of Book of the New Sun it would have made this list. Haven't read any Gene Wolfe but hear only good things
Great list. I’m halfway through The Doors of Eden. It’s pretty good so far, but it’s no Children of Time. Ironically, I’m also part way through Dracula. I was thinking of doing Crime and Punishment this year. Never heard of Cemetery World, but it sounds wonderfully ominous. Didn’t love Roadside Picnic. I knew it was a commentary with a message, but just couldn’t figure out what it was 😜
That is kind of what I figured about Doors of Eden. Good to go into a book with reasonable expectations. We will see if I can make any sense out of Roadside Picnic 😅
You've got a great list of books there. A lot of authors I have not read yet. Would like to get to Greg Bear this year, as well as PKD, Simak, and Silverberg. Just finished my first book by Tchaikovsky (Dogs of War) and enjoyed it. I tried Emily St. John Mandel recently, Station Eleven which is wildly popular, but it didn't grab me in the first few pages, so I switched to another book. Maybe I'll try Sea of Tranquility on your recommendation. Thanks for another great video...
I'm not sure if Mandel is an author that really grabs you. More of a seeping feeling. Give it a shot though maybe I'm wrong.
Silverberg and Simak will definitely both grab you though
2024 looks to be a great reading year, looking forward to the reviews!
I read Frankenstein and Dracula back to back for the first time last year and enjoyed both but personally much preferred Dracula.
Roadside picknick is the other book on the list I have read and it definitely is amazing! Hope you enjoy it as much!
Thanks! Hoping I enjoy it too after all the hype
Really enjoyed Doors of Eden myself. It's a little more mixed bad in some of the characters and the plot takes a bit to really start moving BUT science fiction ideas and extrapolations are tons of fun and it really is more underrated of his works- hope you like it as much as I did!
Sounds about right. Come for the ideas and the aliens and don't expect too much character development. Looking forward to it
A Maze of Death was so bizarre in the best way!
Roadside Picnic was my favorite read last year. I’m still thinking about it. Are you going to try for your book a week challenge again?
Yes but I'm setting a different kind of goal. Will explain in my next review video :)
"Crime and Punishment" is a marvel. One of the best characters in all of literature, Detective Porfiry, appears in it, and questions Raskolnikov, whose crime, a murder, he is investigating. Porfiry asks seemingly random, off-the-wall questions, which Raskolnikov answers honestly, figuring they have nothing to do with his case. But slowly, the walls start closing in on him, and he soon realizes that he's basically confessed to the murder without ever meaning to. The old television character of Columbo, played brilliantly by Peter Falk, was based on Detective Porfiry.
Sounds like a great story. Never really read detective or mystery though
That was easily my favorite scene in C&P, absolutely brilliant
"Dracula" is much easier to read than Frankenstein. I enjoyed it. "Crime and Punishment", a very good read, but very draining. Oh, yeah! "Dune", I read that while active duty. "Blood Music" I"d love to read as well. "The Roadside Picnic"...klunky, yeah, it just seems to have too many concepts up in the air, never completing. It's an airplane that never lands.
Kinda sounds like Vonnegut which gives me hope but we will see
Pro tip: tilt your book 14 degrees to the left when you get to the italics and voila! 😅
Genius!
Man. Read Parable of the Talents. It’ll slap ya.
Will save it for when I need a slap 😅
@@bookjack It reads like something that could have come after 2016, but is from the 90s. To think it's been sitting there trying to warn us. It's a very strange push and pull - in different ways darker and lighter than the first book.
Recently read "I Am Legend" - and was disappointed. Has little in common with the movie. and is primarily about despair. well written but ... depressing.
That does sound like the other book I read of his. Maybe not one for the dead of winter
LOVE and have reread at least five times each with I Am Legend and The Stars, My Destination: Kinda envious of your "virginity"... ENJOY!
A warning: Friends fluent in Russian tell me Crime & Punishment is supposed to be *sick* humor, very gloomy/doomy, and that boring uptight intellectual translators desaturated FD's sarcastic tone.
Awww JEez, DAWN creeped me out like nobody's business; not so much SF as Cronenberg body horror.
A lot of people are going to disagree with me, but I think that after the nightmare ship journey, the book becomes a major snooze with only Lucy stalking her meal as a point of interest. Before that? Perfection.
Thanks!
Thanks for all the insight. Will have to go into Crime and Punishment with some serious boundaries 😅