Tildes Book Club 2024 retrospective

Wes
2024-12-19T12:45:38Z

Hey folks,

Since we're not reading a book this month, I thought it might be nice to have a short retrospective of the last year instead.

As some of you may know, the book club originally started back in 2023 with a "pop-up event" hosted by @cfabbro. We read Roadside Picnic after a few users expressed interest in the title. The discussion had some great comments, and that helped lay the groundwork for making the book club a regular feature.

A few months later, @boxer_dogs_dance kicked the book club off proper in January 2024 with the first nomination thread. Cloud Atlas was selected based on voter interest and ideal library wait times. Despite being a difficult first book, participation was still high and has remained so for each month thereafter.

Boxer has since organized numerous nomination and voting threads, helped establish our format and rules, and has created many discussion prompts for each book. Huge thanks to you for the efforts, @boxer_dogs_dance!

Onto some stats for 2024:

Books Read: 9

Total Pages: 3,277 (average of 364 per book)

Unique Contributors: 59 (or 140 total, when counting returning participants)

Total Comments: 476 (across 121 top-level threads)

Nominations Submitted: 102

Votes Cast: 508

Repeat Nominations: 11 titles were nominated twice, and 6 were eventually chosen. Perseverance pays off!

The list of past discussions can be found here:

March: Cloud Atlas

April: Piranesi

May: The Dispossessed

June: Project Hail Mary

July: Ocean at the End of the Lane

Aug: Small Gods

Sep: This is How You Lose the Time War

Oct: Kindred

Nov: The City We Became

A big thank you to all who have participated, helped organize, commented, or quietly read along! You folks are what make the Tildes community so great.

So just to be clear, this isn't a nomination thread or an official post. I just thought it might be nice to look back, recap our progress, and maybe touch on some of the best picks from the last year.

What were your favourite reads from this past year? What are you looking forward to most in 2025?

See you all in January when we kick off 2025 with Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future!

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~books/1kt4/tildes_book_club_2024_retrospective

Votes: 18

Comments: 17