Books I read in 2024
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motherhood

What I Read in 2024

Mystie Winckler

Mystie Winckler

• 8 min read

I read a significant number of books this year. Here are my lists and reflections on my 2024 reading.

Still Reading

Finished in 2024

Goal: 75 books | Actual: 63

  1. Faith. Hope. Love. Mark Jones. January. Paperback (own). Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Theology.
  2. Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, Rosaria Butterfield. February. Hardback (own). 5x5: Theology.
  3. Le Morte d'Arthur. Thomas Malory. February. Reread. Paperback (own). Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Literature.
  4. Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky. February. Reread. Audible. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Great Novels.
  5. Attention Span. Gloria Mark. February. Audible. 5x5: Education. Scholé Prep. Researches boiling people down to measurable responses gets old really fast, and she made the predictable postmodern feminist refusal to see significance in men and women's behavioral differences. She made an interesting observation from data about people being more valuable to Facebook (advertisers are the customers; users are the product) when angry.
  6. Choose Your Enemies Wisely. Patrick Bet-David. February. Audible. 5x5: Business. I actually read this again at the end of the year during business planning, so it counts double.
  7. Your Next Five Moves. Patrick Bet-David. February. Audible. 5x5: Business.
  8. To The Far Blue Mountains, Louis L'amour. February. Audible. 5x5: Great Novels. This one is my favorite so far in the Sackett series.
  9. The Faerie Queene, Book One. Edmund Spenser. March. Reread. Paperback (own). Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Literature. I love this tale and the notes provided in the Hackett edition were helpful.
  10. The Warrior's Path. Louis L'Amour. March. Audible. 5x5: Fun Fiction. I haven't finished the Sackett series, not by a long shot, but I can't help but think none of the others will top the first three in depth of characters and flashes of insight and wisdom sprinkled throughout.
  11. Slaying Leviathan: Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition. Glenn Sunshine. March. Canon+. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Politics.
  12. Acedia and Its Discontents. R.J. Snell. March. Paperback (own). 5x5: Christian Living. Highly recommended.
  13. The Faerie Queene, Book Two. Edmund Spenser. April. Paperback (own). Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Literature. I prefer Book One to Book Two because the Redcrosse Knight fails and is redeemed and transformed whereas Sir Guyon is incorruptible and, therefore, I thought, boring.
  14. A Town Like Alice. Nevil Shute. April. Audible. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Fun Fiction. Great story.
  15. The Scandal of Money. George Gilder. April. Audible. 5x5: Economics. We're currently in a giant, government-run ponzy scheme and it's probably going to get worse before it resolves; however, it will resolve, most likely through some form of privatizing money. Recommended.
  16. God's Battle Plan for the Mind. David Saxton. April. Paperback (own). Puritan Book Club. 5x5: Christian Living.
  17. Utopia. Thomas More. May. Audible. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Politics. Yes, it's satire.
  18. Institutes of the Christian Religion. John Calvin. Hardcover (own). Reread. School Reading. 5x5: Theology. Always rewarding.
  19. Jubal Sackett. Louis L'Amour. May. Audible. 5x5: Fun Fiction. A family drive listen, this fourth book in the series felt more cliche than previous, but gave many facets of strong masculinity and strong femininity complementing each other rather than competing with one another.
  20. Ride the River. Louis L'Amour. May. Audible. 5x5: Fun Fiction. L'Amour branches out into a female lead in this fun story that works but without the depth of his best novels. I do love how male and female interact in his tales without competition or envy.
  21. The Bible. Completed my fourth Bible Reading Challenge.
  22. At the Edge of the Village. Lisa Leidenfrost. May. Canon+. 5x5: Biography. Because my book club was reading Lisa's second book, I wanted to read the first book first.
  23. From the Village to the Ends of the Earth. Lisa Leidenfrost. May. Canon+. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Biography. I have never thought about what it would take to bring a people from no written language to a translation of God's Word. Fascinating.
  24. Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. David Bahnsen. May. Canon+. 5x5: Economics. Very meh. Mostly overblown rants with qualifications so as not to offend. He never really defined what he meant by work.
  25. In Praise of Folly. Erasmus. June. Kindle. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Culture. I appreciated this so much more having taught the progymnasmata a few years now; the encomium was waiting all those centuries for this sarcastic, ironic, hilarious use case.
  26. The Empowered Wife. Laura Doyle. June. Audible. Reread. 5x5: Femininity. Highly recommended if you have a filter and want to think through specifics of what it means to respect a man as a woman without Christian-culture hangups getting in the way.
  27. The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas. June. Audible. 5x5: Great Novels. Why had I not been told how incredible this book is?! Thrilling, thought-provoking, and true in its depiction of human nature and Providence. Worth every minute. Never stand for an abridgment. Highly recommended.
  28. Feel-Good Productivity. Ali Abdaal. June. Audible. 5x5: Business. I've followed Ali's YouTube channel off and on; he did a good job making the typical productivity advice feel more lighthearted and motivating rather than self-focused and driven.
  29. Appetite Correction, Bert Herring. July. Audible. 5x5: Health. Boring and nothing new.
  30. Beyond Mere Motherhood. Cindy Rollins. July. Paperback (own). 5x5: Femininity. I love Cindy.
  31. Reformation Women: Sixteenth-Century Figures Who Shaped Christianity's Rebirth, Rebecca VanDoodewaard. July. Paperback (own). 5x5: Femininity. Shallow. I bought a few books from the bibliography, though.
  32. The Intellectual Life. Antonin Sertillanges. July. Paperback (own). Reread. 5x5: Reading/Writing. So good.
  33. Profiting from the Word. Arthur Pink. July. Paperback (own). Puritan Book Club. 5x5: Christian Living. Excellent and convicting.
  34. The Prince. Niccolo Machiavelli. July. Audible. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Politics. I learned how little I know of Southern European politics and history at all as he gave historical precedents for his Art-of-War-esque presentation of the principles of political leadership.
  35. A Simple Way to Pray. Martin Luther. Paperback (own). Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Christian Living.
  36. Technopoly. Neil Postman. August. Audible. Conservative Mind Book Club. 5x5: Culture.
  37. How to Read a Book. Andrew David Naselli. August. Canon+. 5x5: Writing/Reading. I kept increasing the speed while listening, waiting for it to be more than his commonplace collection formatted into lists. Meh. I did look up and get some good books off his bibliography.
  38. Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. Joe Rigney. August. Hardback (own). 5x5: Culture. I admit, I postponed reading this because 1) I think the art is awful and 2) it seemed too slim to adequately encapsulate Failure of Nerve. Never underestimate Rigney, however. It's a great little book doing one job, which is not encapsulating Failure of Nerve but rather helping leaders rightly order expectations about how groups of people work. I hope this is the "Strangely Bright" version and a "Things of Earth" version will be forthcoming, because in particular the necessity of hierarchy needs to be further fleshed out.
  39. Bad Therapy. Abigail Shrier. August. Audible. 5x5: Culture. So, even for those children (now young adults) who had involved parents and even intact families, most are functionally fatherless because they received no hard line discipline, just soft pandering and herding. Makes sense and good to know while relating to millenials and zoomers.
  40. The Dungeon of Doom. John R. Erickson. August. Audible. 5x5: Fun Fiction. We listened to this on a family drive because Geneva was unfamiliar with Hank the Cowdog (!).
  41. Stolen Focus. Johann Hari. August. Audible. 5x5: Education. Scholé Prep. A few good research points. Terrible takes and perspective woven throughout.
  42. Indistractible. Nir Eyal. August. Audible. Reread. 5x5: Business. I liked it more the first time.
  43. Improvement of the Mind. Isaac Watts. August. Paperback (own). 5x5: Reading/Writing. Excellent!
  44. Digital Zettelkasten. David Kadavy. August. Audible. 5x5: Writing/Reading. A practical and straightforward guide to making and keeping notes from reading and thinking meant to be used and not just left on the shelf in notebooks.
  45. Foxe's Book of Martyrs. edited by Paul Meier. September. Audible. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: History. Whew. We are weaklings.
  46. Household and the War for the Cosmos. C.R. Wiley. September. Canon+. 5x5: Education. Biblical worldview 101.
  47. Hannah's Children: Stories of Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Catherine Pakaluk. September. Audible. 5x5: Femininity. Recommended by Elly. Stunning. Great stories and insightful takes on culture, society, and economics woven in. She gets it. This is a book we need for where we find ourselves today.
  48. Hamlet. Shakespeare. October. Audible. Reread. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. 5x5: Literature. My favorite Shakespeare.
  49. Saving My Assassin. Virginia Prodan. October. Audible. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Biography. Incredible! Highly recommended. Even in modern times, rulers legit claim to be god - seriously!
  50. Scholé Everyday: How to Be a Thinking Mom. Brandy Vencel and Mystie Winckler and Abby Wahl. October. Google Docs. 5x5: Reading/Writing. Coming in 2025!
  51. A Christian Manifesto, Francis Schaeffer. Paperback (own). Reread. School Reading. 5x5: Christian Living. I think every Christian today should read this perspective from someone who helped bring about the Religious Right movement but here is honest about how and why it will fail - and he was right. Don't make the same mistake. The warning is right here.
  52. Lando. Louis L'Amour. October. Audible. 5x5: Fun Fiction.
  53. 2000 Years of Christ's Power, vol. 1. Nick Needham. October. Hardback (own). School Reading. 5x5: History.
  54. North and South. Elizabeth Gaskell. November. Audible. 5x5: Great Novels. Read on Ilse's recommendation.
  55. Pro Rege. Abraham Kuyper. November. Hardback (own). 5x5: Theology. Parts were fascinating and parts were a slog.
  56. Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe. November. Reread. Well-Educated Mind Book Club. Audible. 5x5: Literature. A wild ride.
  57. Leave It to Psmith. P.G. Wodehouse. November. Audible. Reread. 5x5: Fun Fiction. The best Wodehouse.
  58. Choose Your Enemies Wisely. Patrick Bet-David. November. Audible. 5x5: Business. Reread.
  59. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Baroness Orczy. December. Audible. Conservative Minds Book Club. 5x5: Literature. It was popular fiction of its time. I don't think there was great character development and no insight into the human condition.
  60. My Dear Hemlock. Tilly Dillehay. Paperback (own). 5x5: Femininity. Entertaining and insightful!
  61. Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde. Audible. 5x5: Literature. What a terrible story! Now I understand why Chesterton took every opportunity to lampoon Wilde.
  62. Deschooling Society. Ivan Illich. Paperback (own). 5x5: Education.
  63. Systematic Theology. John Frame. Audible. 5x5: Theology. I took a long time to finish this one (50 hours!), but it was well worth it. I'm glad I have the hardback also to reference and pull quotes from. I love the tri-perspective lens!

Stats:

  • 12 Rereads (19%)
  • My Top Five Recommendations for My Readers:
    • Acedia and Its Discontents
    • Bad Therapy
    • Hannah's Children
    • Count of Monte Cristo
    • A Christian Manifesto
  • 5x5 Categories (my goal this year was to complete a 5x15, but I did a 5x12)
    • Theology - 5
    • Christian Living - 5
    • Education - 5
    • History & Biography - 5
    • Politics & Economics - 5
    • Culture - 5
    • Femininity - 5
    • Business - 5
    • Literature - 5
    • Great Novels - 5
    • Fun Fiction - 8
    • Reading/Writing - 5
  • Format
    • Audio - 40
    • Print - 22
    • Digital - 1

ChatGPT's analysis of my year's reading

This reading list reflects an outstanding year of intellectual and spiritual growth. The blend of rigorous academic works, culturally significant literature, and practical modern titles shows a well-rounded reader who engages deeply with ideas while keeping them grounded in faith. With slight adjustments in goals and perhaps a stronger emphasis on personal favorites, 2025 could prove even more fulfilling.

While 63 books in a year is remarkable, falling short of the 75-book target might indicate the need to reassess pacing or selection breadth. Setting a slightly more achievable goal could boost motivation without diminishing quality.

75 is totally achievable, really. I need to be more consistent with my print reading time and choose more books over podcasts in 2025. I listened to enough hours of podcasts to get in at least 5 more books, most likely.

Need more time to read?

Work through a time budget and be intentional about where and how you use your time.

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Written by

Mystie Winckler

Mystie Winckler

Mystie, homeschooling mom of 5, shares the life lessons she's learned and the grace she's received from Christ. She is author of Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done
Books I read in 2024
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