My End-of-Year Report

I saw a post from Helen of She Reads Novels about her historical fiction reading goals, and that made me decide to write an end-of-year report about my reading, starting this year. I am pulling most of the data from StoryGraph, which I switched over to from Goodreads this last year.

First, I set a goal of reading 160 books this year, and I read 156. I felt especially slowed down over Christmas time because of everything going on. Some of my comparative stats this year were interesting, especially this one:

You can see that in general I read shorter books this year than I usually do, 50% being less than 300 pages and only 5% being more than 500 pages. I think that was because I was trying to achieve some goals under tight deadlines, but I also read quite a few novellas for Novellas in November this year. And toward the end of the year, I put my books for A Century of Books project in order by the shortest first, so that I could finish as many as possible (although not very many were short)! Sneaky, huh?

For fiction vs. nonfiction, I am still doing lamentably little in the nonfiction area. However, I read 1% more nonfiction this year than in previous years, so I guess Nonfiction November is having an impact. Let’s see if I do better this coming year.

Here are the genres I’ve read this year with the number of books for each:

• Historical fiction: 47
• Literary fiction: 43
• Mysteries: 39
• Classics: 37
• Crime: 26
• History: 10
• Thriller: 10
• LBGTQIA+: 8
• Biography: 7
• Contemporary: 7

These are Storygraph’s categories. I’m not sure, for example, how Crime and Mystery are differentiated or whether they overlap. Obviously, some categories must overlap, because these numbers add up to more books than I read. Also, I’m fairly sure I read one or two nonfiction books that don’t fit easily into either biography or history, so I’m not sure how they have categorized them.

StoryGraph also provided me with a list of writers I read most this year vs. for all time. I’m not showing this list because the most books I read this year of any one writer is four. However, I will say that the only writer who appears on both lists (this year vs. all time) is Georgette Heyer, and that the only man who appears on either list is, of all people, Fyodor Dostoevsky. (But that’s only two books.) However, if I switch this graph to show the repeat authors for last year, I get two more male writers for 2023, John Dickson Carr and Martin Edwards (four books by each!).

As usual, my top ten list for the year will appear on my blogging day closest to my blog anniversary. This year, it will be Friday, January 24. For a few months, at any rate, I am going to be blogging on Fridays again until I catch up a little closer with my reading.