I've always read a lot, but for most of my life I never recorded what I read. I know I can do it electronically via Goodreads, but I only use Goodreads for reviews, and perhaps this makes me a bad person, but I don't write a review for every single book I read. Plus, not everything I read is even available on Goodreads. I kept a reading journal for the first time in 2022. In that case I just found a random half empty notebook left over from one of my children's school years and ripped out and recycled the pages that had been used for assignments. In 2023 I bought myself a nice journal to record my reading. It's just under half full at this point, so I presume it will last at least through the end of 2026.
I record not only the titles and authors, but the the genre and age group, whether I read or listened on audio, and a sentence or two about my impressions of the book.
For the third year in a row, the number of books I read decreased, though I still seem to read more than average. The first year I read 217 books. In 2022 I wasn't writing anything of my own and I wasn't working outside the home with regularity until the middle of October. That left me with a lot of time to read. In 2023 I read 153 books, which means the number decreased by 64. I believe that was mostly due to regularly working 15 hours a week outside the home and also due to some personal turmoil and a short reading drought brought on by frustration regarding my own lack of writing success. So what happened this year?
This year I read 115 books. That's still a decrease, but only a decrease of 37 books. I think the decrease happened for two reasons. First, I read and listened to more adult books this year than in previous years and adult books are, on average, longer than middle grade books, which dominated my reading in 2022 and 2023. Second, in addition to continuing to work outside the home 15 hours of a week, I dedicated much of my time on my days off and evenings working on producing a query ready draft of the first novel manuscript I finished since 2021. That left me with less time to dedicate to reading.
I went through my journal and broke down the books in several different ways. First, by age group. In 2024 I read:
3 picture books
3 chapter books
57 middle grade books
6 young adult books
46 adult books
I listened to 39 audiobooks and read 76 print books.
The majority of the books I read, 90, were fiction, and 25 were nonfiction. That's actually a decent increase in percentage of nonfiction books. Last year I read only three fewer nonfiction books, 22, but 131 fiction.
Of the nonfiction, 1 was a book length essay about writing, 2 were popular history, and 22 were theology. Yeah, I read a lot of theology. I won't go into details on this blog, but my theology has evolved a lot over the last few years, and a lot of these books helped me bring things I'd been feeling in my heart into my head.
I read/listen to most of my books by myself, but I also read some books to my teen, who still hasn't outgrown bedtime reading, thankfully, and we also often listen to books together on the drive to and from school and on road trips. This year I read/listened to 95 books by myself and read/listened to 20 books with my teen. This is down from previous years because her schedule has gotten busier and we haven't had time to read every night.
Nearly everything I read was written in prose. I read 1 novel in verse, 11 graphic novels, and 102 prose books.
Two of the books I read were beta reads for writing friends. The other 113 were published books.
Finally, breaking the fiction down by genre, I read:
34 contemporary realistic books
28 speculative books
15 mysteries/thrillers
9 historical books
and, finally, 4 romances
The genre breakdown doesn't completely reflect my own preferences. More than half the books I read/listened to with my teen were contemporary realistic, because that's her preferred genre. I do like the genre quite a bit, however.
The speculative books leaned toward contemporary fantasy, but there was a bit of science fiction, paranormal, and mostly contemporary with speculative elements mixed in.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown. Whether my numbers look small or large to you, I hope you enjoyed your reading year. Whether you read one book or 500, you're a winner in my book.
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