As is now gleeful tradition, I posted my Unmissable SFF of 2024 list at the start of the year – the SFF books I was most anticipating. But this year, I kept track of which ‘unmissables’ were in fact awesome, and which were disappointments. So let’s have a look at that!

Overview

By the end of 2024, I had, at once point or another, declared 110 books Unmissable. At least a handful of these were added to the list after I’d read them; so, books I didn’t know to anticipate, but thought everyone ought to know about once I discovered how great they were. That skews things (it doesn’t count as accurate predicting if I only added them after I read them) but I didn’t keep track of what I added when, so we’ll just have to roll with it.

(For those interested: September and October had the highest number of books-declared-unmissable, with 12 each.)

Out of that 110, I…

read 56.
dnfed 30.
soft dnfed 7.
never started 13.
am still reading 5.
reviewed 72.

So out of 110, I got to 98 (read, dnf/soft dnf, am still reading), aka 89.09%, of the books on the list. (I finished 56, or 50.91%.) That seems pretty good to me!

Fails

This was the first year that, instead of removing books from the list when it turned out I hated them, I just struck them out instead, allowing me to keep track of the let-downs. Out of the 93 I read or attempted (read, dnf/soft dnf), 29 (31.18%) were strike-outs. You might think they were all DNFs, but nope: I didn’t strike out every DNF, only the ones I thought were objectively bad, and of the books I did strike out, 6 were books I read to the end.

Speaking of DNFs, I ended up DNFing 33.64% of this year’s Unmissables. A whole third of the list!

Wins

Of the 56 Unmissables I read to the end…

8 were perfectly fine.
8 were great.
34 were new faves.

That seems pretty great to me – counting Greats and Faves, that’s 42 of 54 that were successes!

Or…

On the other hand, if we take it as 42 of 110 – 38.18% – that doesn’t seem very impressive. It means that only about a third of the books I thought were Unmissable actually turned out to be worth reading (for me). Meaning my ability to predict what I’m going to like isn’t that accurate!

(Although in fairness, a big part of that is probably because there’s so much we don’t know about a book when we’ve only got the blurb, and lots of those things we don’t know will directly affect my enjoyment. When you’re as picky as I am, the blurb is, apparently, only a good judge of awesomeness about a third of the time.)

Here’s another way to look at it: 24 Unmissables ended up on my Best of 2024 list. That’s just 21.82%. So only about a fifth of the books I thought would be the best of the year actually were.

TL;DR

Of the books on the list, I…

got to 89.09%.
enjoyed 38.18%.
dnfed* 33.64%.
hated 31.18%.
reviewed** 65.45%.
found 21.82% to be actually Unmissable.

I’m pleased I got to so many; I wish I’d reviewed more (although I hope I can get reviews written for more of them eventually!) I enjoyed more books than I hated, but I DNFed almost as many as I enjoyed.

I think this is pretty clear proof that I can’t predict Unmissables with any great accuracy at this time!

Is that going to stop me making an Unmissable list for 2025??? Of course not! It’s way too much fun. You can expect it to go live in the next couple of weeks, as usual!

Did you enjoy most of the books you read this year?

*including soft DNFs
**as of right now: I’ll come back and edit if I manage to review more Unmissables before the New Year!