In Which I Review My Year in Reading for the Third Time

 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.

In Which I Review My Year in Reading

 I'm done pretending I'm going to update this blog monthly. I'll check in when I'm inspired and have something to say. Maybe that will happen more often if I actually have books on the shelves in the future.

Anyway, it's the first day of 2024 (how is that even possible, by the way?) so it's time to review my 2023 year in reading. I didn't read quite as many books as last year, but still a very respectable number. I think my number dipped for a few reasons. First of all, I started consistently working for pay last year in early October. Since then, I've been working 15 hours a week teaching preschool. That means that for 9 months of last year I simply had more time to read each week. Second, this year has included some personal challenges for me and sometimes I just haven't had the energy to read or even listen to a book. Third, I'm now on the second year of querying the book everyone (including published writers who read the manuscript) was so sure would be "the one" with nary an agent offer or book contract in sight, which has at times poisoned my desire to read other peoples' books. That last one is a pretty small factor. My lack of success with that book has completely sabotaged my own writing.

I've personally found that recording my reading makes it more meaningful to me, and this year I went a step further and bought myself a pretty journal to use as my reading log. It's not full, and should serve me for at least a couple more years.

First, let's make it clear that audiobooks count as reading. So my total number of "books read" includes both print and audio books. I'll get more granular with it below, just wanted to get that out of the way. My total number of books read is 153. That's only 58 less than 2022, not bad given the mitigating factors above.

First of all, 115 were print books while 38 were audio.

I read 140 books that were new to me and reread 13 books.

I read 124 of the books by myself and 29 with my twelve year old.

Most of the books, 149, were in English, but 3 were in Swedish and one was in Spanish.

Again, the majority of the books,131, were fiction while 22 were nonfiction.

Breaking it down by age group, I read:

6 picture books

4 chapter books

93 middle grade books

9 young adult bookss

and 41 adult books

Breaking the fiction down by genre, I read:

61 speculative  books (these were mostly fantasy, but I've also lumped in paranormal, dystopian, and horror)

43 realistic fiction

15 mysteries

and, last but not least, 5 romances

That last breakdown I did was by format:

121 of the books were traditional prose format

28 were graphic (you might call them comics), including three graphic memoirs and a graphic history

3 were novels in verse

1 was a book of poetry

I've always been a big reader, but this is only the second year I've kept a reading log. I highly recommend it. Whether you read four books a year or four hundred, remembering what you read and taking some space to reflect on it can be really helpful. Despite my number of books read being fewer than last year, I know I read more books than average. Averaging it out, I read almost three books a week. Remember though that the majority of these books are written for children, which  makes them quicker reads. Also, I normally have four books going at once: one print book I'm reading on my own, one print book I'm reading to my 12yo, one audiobook I'm listening to on my own and one audiobook I'm listening to with my 12yo. That gets me through books faster than I'd get through them if I took them one at a time. Whether your total number of books read in 2023 is much smaller than mine, much larger than mine, or about the same, if you read something you're a winner in my book.

In Which I Review My Reading Year

I've always read a lot of books, but before this year I've never kept a record of which books I've read or how many. This year I decided to keep a reading log and, since this is the last day of the year  it seems an appropriate time to review the year. Here's the cover of the reading log. I just used an old notebook and decorated it with stickers.

I used a different color pen for each age group. Here's an example of a two page spread showing books of different age groups. The crossed out part is a book I started but quite reading after a few chapters.

As you can see, I recorded more than the book's title. I record the author (and illustrator in the case of picture books and graphic novels with more than one creator), the genre, the dates I started and finished the book, and a sentence or two about the book.

Before I break down the numbers, let me make some things clear. First, I count audiobooks as reading. My 11yo and I almost always listen to an audiobook while we drive back and forth to school and other places around town. I listen to own audiobook both while I'm driving by myself and doing things around the house. That's how most of the adult books made it on the list. I only count books I read for the first time. I reread a few books with my 11yo that I read a previous year and didn't add them to the list. I teach two year old preschool three days a week and I also don't count the dozens of board books I read to the kids again and again at work. I do count picture books I read on my own to study picture book craft (which I still have a lot to learn about).

My grand total of books read in 2022 is 217. Yes, that's a huge number, but keep in mind that most of these aren't 300+ page novels written for adults. The large majority are middle grade books, which do tend to be quicker reads. Breaking it down by age category, I read:

58 adult books

4 young adult books

137 middle grade books

5 chapter books

13 picture books

Of these, 153 were print books and 64 were audiobooks.

Only 6 of the books I read were nonfiction. The other 211 were fiction.

This number may seem amazing to you, or you may have read even more books this year. It doesn't really matter. If you read this year (and remember, audiobooks count as reading) you're a winner in my book.