As this year draws to a close, I wanted to take some time to talk about the year-end hype. For the second-to-last Sunday Bookish Discussion of the year, I want to talk about one of the biggest topics of the month and get to hear a little about how you feel about Best Books of 2024 Lists.
After doing some blog hopping this week, I was surprised to see a number of people reference different lists of the best books of 2024. I’m familiar with the names of some of these lists, but haven’t actually taken the time to browse through them. However, I was only familiar with some of the titles that were highlighted as best books of the year. I rarely ever check out these lists, only because they don’t tend to highlight many books that I have an interest in.
I was really impressed with Deb @ The Book Stop and the amount of effort she put into her Top Ten Tuesday post from this week, where books were aggregated and put into a spreadsheet and there was a process that sounds complicated to me, but it’s probably not nearly as complicated as I think. Ultimately, she came up with a list of ten books to add to her TBR based on the ranking of best of the year lists. I found it intriguing to see the books that she added, and was surprised that I read one and had a couple more on my TBR.
How do you feel about those lists of best books of the year? Do you often read books from lists like that?
Categories: Sunday Bookish Discussion
Leah's Books 
Thanks Leah for referencing my post! My analysis was much less complicated than you suggest, but I did look at some of the best-of lists I find most useful to see which books were common across them. I focused on books I was personally interested in reading, so there were books on the lists that I didn’t pay as much attention to. I tend to use these lists as a jumping off point for the coming year, since I didn’t get to very many of them this year.
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Of course I had to reference your post – it was such a good one! I definitely made it sound way more complicated, but I was most surprised to see that I had a couple of books on my TBR from those best-of lists.
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I’ve never really been a huge fan of the “top X lists of YEAR”, because like you I find that those lists rarely touch on the genres and types of books I like to read. I’ll always take an interest in my friends’ lists though, as I love a good personal recommendation!
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Yes! I’m not the only one. The books on best of lists rarely include my preferred genres. They always seem to focus on literary fiction on aren’t as diverse as the books I enjoy.
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