What a year it’s been!

Martyr! came out of the gate in January as the year’s hottest debut with major book award potential, and while it didn’t win the NBA, it made the shortlist and just about every best-of list around. Jonathan Haidt sparked a new round of phone and social media concern—and some congressional hearings—with The Anxious Generation. James was indisputably the most anticipated novel of the year, and it’s ending the year as the indisputable champion. Simon & Schuster tried—and mostly succeeded—to make fetch happen with the every-genre-and-the-kitchen-sink romp The Ministry of Time. Miranda July launched a thousand midlife crises with her manic pixie perimenopause novel, All Fours (I was not a fan). Sally Rooney got adults out to midnight release parties for Intermezzo. Romantasy ruled BookTok and bestseller lists. Even Louise Erdrich got sprayed edges. A lot happened.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you leave a content creator alone with Google Analytics during one of the quietest weeks of the year, they’re going to go spelunking. Presented in no particular order, here are 10 of the news stories Book Riot readers read and shared the most in 2024.

We are four years into this wave of book censorship. There are plenty of new folks entering the fray, discovering that at heart, none of this is about books at all. It’s about ensuring access to public goods like public libraries and public schools remain the democratic institutions of civic engagement that they are and it’s about ensuring that entire swaths of people—queer folks, people of color, and anyone else who doesn’t fit into the neat and tidy image of the cishet able-bodied Christian white male—aren’t erased.

It is great to see continued growth in wanting to learn and engage in the fight to protect the First Amendment rights of all and especially young people. There are plenty of guides for what to do and how, including throughout the four years’ worth of Literary Activism newsletters. There will be another guide coming next week that serves as a year-long plan for understanding the past, present, and future of book bans.

But this week, to wrap up 2024, let’s take a look back at a few of the most popular and most urgent posts about censorship this year. The news roundup itself will be short as well, given that most schools are out for the holidays and public library boards are not scheduling their meetings during this time, either.

This is the time to catch up, to reflect, and to refill your cup in preparation for what will be a longer, harder, darker battle in 2025.

Louisiana HB 777 Would Criminalize Librarians and Libraries Who Join the American Library Association

What are the most popular library book checkouts from 2024? This is a tough question to answer, in part because not every library reports on the books being checked out, some do but separate out genres and formats (i.e., they pull out mystery checkouts from overall checkouts or count digital and print separately), and because the reports on top checkouts might show up at different times at the end of one year or in the beginning of another. But as we count down to the end of 2024, what can we gather about popular library books from the year based on the information that can be surfaced?

Looking at over 40 different “top library book” checkout lists from big and small public libraries across the USA, here are some of the most popular books of the year. What makes looking at public library book popularity fun is that it is year-agonistic, meaning that books published this year might sit alongside books published several years ago. Genre books tend to see more top books lists in libraries than in other outlets who compile or write about the year’s best or top books.

There are a number of interesting trends in the most popular books. Many are titles that were highly decorated in the previous year, and as always, genre fiction tends to do a lot of circulation in public libraries. Certainly, there are some books that pop up that have had their moment on BookTok, but that showing is not as strong as in last year’s roundup of most popular books in US libraries.

White authors tend to dominate in these lists, but the lists across the 40 libraries surveyed are more varied than what bubbles up to the top. This is, of course, a result of how publishing is still a predominantly white industry, and the books that tend to get bigger publicity and marketing around them are by white authors—it’s also worth addressing here that some of the biggest genre writers are long-time writers, so hitting the top of the most-circulated list as a newer genre writer can be tough. Again: that doesn’t mean they aren’t here or don’t circulate in libraries. It means they’re not at the tippy top.

Another element to consider in looking at these lists is the role that the digital platforms for library ebooks play themselves. Some collections will simply have more copies of particular titles than others, allowing for more checkouts of said titles. Likewise, whatever books are being promoted on those digital platforms via book lists or readalike lists (aka, what to read if you liked a particular title or movie) can impact what people borrow. It was interesting looking through hundreds of the most popular titles and seeing some surprises bubble up on the “top ebook” checkout lists. As you’ll see below, though, the top checkouts in print and ebooks have been collapsed into single lists.

When my days get busy, and I start to feel overwhelmed, I tend to reach for science fiction and fantasy novels. Sometimes, you just need a whirlwind adventure novel. And with The Stardust Grail, Yume Kitasei delivers.

I’ve loved horror since I was a kid. So when I had the chance to breathe the same air as Nick Cutter, Tananarive Due, and Stephen Graham Jones, I was over the moon. These three titans of contemporary horror — along with paranormal investigator Steve Gonsalves — appeared in a Spotlight on Horror panel at last year’s New York Comic Con. Listening to them speak about my most favorite genre in the whole world left me feeling as if I’d ascended to a higher plane of awesomeness.

What I am excited about — and what these rad panelists acknowledged — is that there are so many new voices representing the genre. Once upon a time, I had to rely upon the old John Saul paperbacks I pulled from my father’s shelves and his collection of Stephen King doorstoppers. If I wanted to explore further, I dug deeper into the classics: Edgar Allen Poe. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Shirley Jackson. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But these days, I feel as if we’re seeing new classics. Books and authors who, one day, will loom as large as their predecessors. To me, they already do.

In the list below, I shout out some of the contemporary horror authors (and their standout titles) who seem most notable to me, alongside the classic authors who preceded them.

Forty years ago, in May of 1984, two young, unknown men sat at a table at a comic book convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was the first-ever Portsmouth Mini-Con, a tiny, local event with about 200 attendees. The two young creators had brought along their new comic, which they had published through their own independent publishing company, Mirage Studios, with an initial print run of 3,275 copies. It was printed in black and white on cheap newsprint, and copies sold for $1.50 each.

There was no reason to believe that this deliberately silly, cheaply produced comic would change comics and pop culture history or that one of those $1.50 copies would someday be worth thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars on the collectors’ market. But this was the debut outing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1.

The gamble worked. Within weeks, they sold out and had to reprint. Demand was so high that they decided to turn their one-shot into a series. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 had 15,000 preorders. Issue #3 had 50,000 preorders. Cowabunga!

Every week, I put together a list of the most read books on Goodreads this week, but now that we’re at the end of the year, I can finally set that time span to “the last 12 months” and find out what the most read books on Goodreads were in 2024. What’s interested is that Goodreads already put out a list called The 144 Most Read Books of the 2024 Reading Challenge, and there are some notable differences between the two.

The Most Read Books page is only 50 books long, so of course not all 144 titles are on that list. But more strange is that not all 50 books are on that longer list. For example, there are five Sarah J. Maas books on the 144 book list, but 16(!) on the Most Read Books page.

It’s not surprising to me that Goodreads used some editorial discretion putting together their list, because the story looking at the raw data is a lot more boring. 24 of the 50 books listed are by Sarah J. Maas or Freida McFadden—just shy of 50% of the titles are shared between only two authors.

The most read books on Goodreads this year aren’t diverse by any sense of the word. Roughly 95% are by white authors. About 85% of the books included are either romance, fantasy, or thrillers. Only one is nonfiction: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, in the 50th spot.

Before you keep scrolling, take a guess what you think the top five most read books on Goodreads were this year. If you’ve been paying attention to the bestseller lists or these weekly roundups, I think you could get 100%!

Monday through Friday, Today in Books highlights news from around the world of books and reading. In this weekend edition, enjoy a look at the stories we covered in-house.

Censorship Trends to Watch for in 2025, Part II

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

Innovative Study Finds That Public Libraries Positively Impact Community Health and Wellbeing

Poet, Writer, and Activist Nikki Giovanni Dies at 81

Today, I have another installment of “The Best Queer Books of 2024, According to…” Previously, I sifted through The New York Times, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, and Barnes & Noble lists for the queer titles included. This time, I’m highlighting the NPR picks.

The year-end NPR list is a little different from most. They put out a list of hundreds of “Books We Love” from the year, which you can sort by category, like “Book Club Ideas” or “Seriously Great Writing” or “Historical Fiction” or “It’s All Geek to Me” or “Rather Short” or a combination of different aspects. There isn’t an LGBTQ filter, but that’s where I come in!

There are 351 books on the 2024 NPR list, so there’s a very good chance I missed some, but I spotted 30 queer titles included in a range of genres. It’s nice that they included queer books I haven’t seen mentioned in other lists, like Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki. Then again, they also included the new Abigail Shrier on this list—the author who wrote the incredibly transphobic and harmful book Irreversible Damage. So, that’s a real dent in how seriously I can take their recommendations.

Regardless of the source, these are some fantastic queer books of 2024 you might not have heard about elsewhere, so without further ado, here are the 30 best queer books of 2024, according to NPR.

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