I read 25 titles over the year, split about evenly between non-fiction and fiction. I'll only mention the non-fic here.
The Great (in alphabetic order)
If We Burn by Vincent Bevins - not much to add on this text that hasn't already been said. It's as good as people say and as valuable an analysis as a liberal is likely to offer. If you're actively organizing rn (and if you're not what are you doing) this is a really good text to cover with your comrades or just by yourself.
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Fererici - what a surprise this book fucking cooks. Very rich text. I think some people who haven't read it assume the "witch" part of the title is dominant and overlook the "Caliban" part, this is not simply a text on Marxist feminism (not to belittle texts that are), but really a much grander effort to discuss the psychosocial changes that were/are required of a pre-capitalist society to turn it into a capitalist one. Very cool text, she's a very cool lady with a lot to say.
The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World by Vijay Prishad - a people's history of the Non-Aligned Movement. A lot of his later texts are poorly-cited pamphlets but this earlier work is very serious, incredibly thoughtful and artful constructed. It's easy to imagine a version of this book being that is a bunch of sprawling facts as it involves like 80 different counties but he organizes the book by concept (like developmental economics, the cultural question, IMF and World Bank, Saudi exportation of Wahhabist islam as a counter to secular Arab nationalism) and centers each chapter around a city that acts as a metonym for the idea, then expands the chapter to other areas that had significant movements with respect to the idea. Highly recommended.
The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan - great short and accessible text by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on the fundamental contradiction of solving a housing crisis without addressing housing as an asset. If you're a leftist living in C*nada you're probably doing some organizing around housing, this is a must for sure. Really crystallizes in simple language a lot of important points, and the citations are a goldmine - specifically Canadian statistics and reporting.
The Good
Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire - this shit rocks. A little sprawling but definitely fire. Almost more poetry than theory.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber - I loved Debt but had low expectations for this one and was reluctant to read it (I expected it would just be an extremely padded out version of the essay, which I liked). I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, and I'm reminded how skillful 
was at gently taking a reader along and path that is unambiguously radical, yet each individual step on the path seems casual and reasonable. Easy read.
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel - like the above, this was surprisingly high quality and a very easy read (I think I knocked it out in like 4 days and I'm a slow reader). Much more bold than I expected, he began his argument paraphrasing Federici's key arguments from Caliban and the Witch, asking readers to consider that the manner in which we have grown to think about ourselves as removed from the environment is a relatively new manner of thinking that coincided with the birth of capitalism, and a successful effort to overcome fossil capital will also require an effort to undo this view of the Earth as an instrument for us as opposed to something we're a part of. Most of the rest is just a well-articulated outline of the degrowth argument which you may already be familiar with.
Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo - very cool, but can be a little plodding at times. I don't think I knew just how much of the text would be focused not just on liberal societies but writings of 18th century liberal philosophers. Nonetheless I think everyone here should read it eventually as it does outline a pretty important argument about liberalism that is built upon in...
Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo - great text and important. Again a little slow and drawn out. There is a 30 page transcription of the speech this text was based on attached in the Appendix, and I wonder how well it would do to just read that.
The Decent
Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar - this guy was cool, he was a liberal ultimately but still very cool to read this text and the supporting documentation around it (I read the Verso version with the Arunduthi Roy 120 page essay on him and Ghandi, plus other flavour to expand on the context.) Glad I read it.
Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein - really has its ups and downs. There are some interesting arguments in here, but also a lot of just reading about a rich liberal's relationship to Twitter. She's better on Israel than I would have expected and dedicated two chapters to antizionism which I was surprised by.
The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy by Art Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson - good and fiery, but maybe a little off-the-cuff in some ways. If you live in C*nada you should probably read it some time but it's not the first text on the topic I'd recommend.
Wage Labour and Capital Karl Marx - I often struggle with Marx's prose and I'm much more of an Engels guy. I also often feel like reading these original texts is a bit of a waste of time tbh, like basically no physicist would ever sit down and read Newton's Principia, reading the original text requires quite a lot of labour and the extra value you get out of doing so is questionable at best. (Hot take I know but w/e just being honest)
Wouldn't Recommend
Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis - There is some good stuff in here but I was hoping for a lot more analysis. The pages were stuffed instead with example after example of barbaric suffering of those enduring famine. I don't mind reading about those kind of things but was really hoping he'd do a lot more with the space he had. I don't think Mike Davis is for me.
Looking Forward to reading in 2025
I'm part way through Andreas Malm's new book Overshoot which is really great so far. I think if there's one theorist who I think is underread I think it's Malm, he's the only one I see writing about the climate apocalypse with anything approaching the urgency of the task at hand, and his writing is incisive.
Also looking to maybe read Piketty's Capital and Ideology, Losurdo's Class Struggle, and some Strugatsky Brothers. Open to recommendations though!
Read: Sakai's Dangerous Class - Reading/having knowledge of 18th Brumaire coming into this helps, not a long read and if you find Marx's work cryptic go for it
Biography of Zhou Enlai lalong with some select readings - highly recommend
Econ and social structure of Fascism by Sohen - highly recommend, you want this one
Psychology of Fascism by Reich - Hits in some places, lots of libertarian brainworms makes it a hard read, would recommend Fannon and Cesaire instead of you want some of the psych aspect and Federici for the gender disparity issues, it does have some dramatic lines though that are fun quotable
Peasant War by Engels, obvious req reading
Zakk Cope (Kkkope)'s Divided world divided class, the figures check out as do some rough edges and connections, but there's way too many overt brainworms, if you got 2/3 of the way through this like I did you won't even see that reactionary 'heel turn' as a heel turn, it was coming down the assembly line at any moment and I don't think I can do the last third
Not theory nonfic;
Beloved Beasts - Bit lib but about conservationism and its history, not a terrible read
Biography of Hirshfield - this was interesting I thought, but I'm gsrm so bias shows One by Pas - Terribly lib, about monoism's place in physics, too idealist but a textbook example of that stack overflow from mechanical materialism into idealist metaphysics without knowing about reddit nerds
Superforecasting - Nah, I would recommend Thinkertoys instead if you like puzzles, or just to see agency inspired think tank tactics, diamat trivializes some of the content if you do try some of the later chapter thinking puzzles
Enochian empire - sure sounds like a magic history book with some dawn of the colonial era geopolitics and spying, but there's an interesting origins of imperialism colonialism from a rather different perspective such things are looked at in this along with some glance at bourgeois moralizing and self destructive tendencies and its reflection
Hope to Read:
Lots of losurdo's works, hope to start with Class Struggle
Counter revolution of 1776
Palo Alto
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Reread Dialect of Nature
non theory Origin of the bicameral mind -been wanting to read this since college, better be worth it
Abu Nuwas poetry, another been wanting to read for 10+ yrs
The recently published one by Chen Jian? I've been eyeing that at my local library.
Its the version from 1981 you can stumble upon online rather readily
Thanks
Whoah haha I had no idea J. Sakai wrote other books.
Could you elaborate on the brainworms in 'Divided World, Divided Class'? I read it a few years ago and was relatively shocked by Cope becoming a shithead. (inasmuch as any white academic leftist can surprise you by becoming a reactionary)
What range alarms the heaviest were some of his takes on the origin of capital along with diving capitalism into an ideal 'free trade capitalism' from its origins in 'mercantile capitalism' then more modern industrial and 'monopoly capitalism' harping on about the evils about the later stages with an almost lack of realization they were always there from the origin, stuff doesn't come from thin air, the same beast just in development growing into what we see today, however, he highlights the history quite well. That is something I see chud economists and dabblers do, so immediately I wasn't surprised about his 180, free trade dreaming my ass, though he even points out why this isn't a thing in some of his stats its weird he doesn't connect it as fully. Its almost as if he's taking the approach of a snipe hunt for an economic version of the missing link or magical economic transmutation, where human development is in neat stages when reality it isn't quite so.
Then there's utter stark defeatism, sure some of it is beyond warranted, though even when he's quite good at looking at the context of things honestly there's a sense he should know better and it fails to realize the fluidity of some of our conditions and adaptation though some is quite cooked in socially for a bit. Then there's some of your standard radlib anti-AES brainworms that go a little too strong, and there's a vibe of while pointing out the issues and weaknesses of imperialism yet seeing the periphery as unable to fully save themselves which really rubbed me the wrong way.
He did seem trapped in the white western 'Third Worldist' trap of saying "I can't do anything here so you have to let me theorize while people in the Global South do the real fighting and dying of revolution."—never minding that correct theory comes from nowhere but social practice and he is unable to participate from the imperial core.
I've noticed many Western supposed left academics having, due to their conditions in the core granted, an otherizaton of whatever marginalized worker you can come up with that they should know better theoretically, that these are the people they need to reach out to and educate, not scoff and roll their eyes that they're unable to be helped because of the excuse de jour. Even if all you can do is agitate people and tell them the basics of another way that's 500x better than rolling over defeated 'wah wah revolution dead before it started, all of them died, no true economic revolution, eternal capitalism's boot on my face'.