My 2024 Reading Wrapped: My Reading Stats with Over 100 Books
Past Wrap Up Posts:
Major Stats
This is the real meat of the post right up front. I get super granular with random stats that I can pull out of my yearly spreadsheet later on, but I figure we'll start with the big picture. The biggest of which is how many total books I managed to read in 2024, and that is 104 total books. I probably could've read another book or two, but in the last few days of the year, I decided I wanted to be done with reading for the year and shifted my attention away from reading so much. My goal for this year was only 75 books, so I well exceeded that, but I did fall short of last year's total of 126 books, likely because I had less time this year. I didn't have as much time off in December as last year, and I spent more time at work through the fall than I ever did hours in school, so it was naturally going to decrease. My commute now is driving, so I don't get reading time there. I am still very excited I made it over the 100 books line. Once I did that, I stopped thinking about my book goal. Even though it's a dip from last year, it's still vastly higher than my reading totals in the first years of college. I'm so glad to have my book groove back. If you're curious about my reading totals since I started tracking in 2017, here's all of the year's past books read.
2024: 104 books
2023: 126 books
2022: 37 books
2021: 39 books
2020: 74 books
2019: 88 books
2018: 116 books
2017: 119 books
The next big stat is the number of pages I actually read among the books, which I think is quite revealing. I tend to read very short books (this year there were a ton of them), and I always find it interesting to see how the page counts stack up year to year along with the book counts. I'll get into more about my longest and shortest books later, but I ended up with 31,576 pages read total. That's a bit less than 10,000 fewer pages than last year, but interestingly, it's only a little over 1,000 pages more than 2019 when I read significantly fewer books.
2024: 31,576 pages
2023: 40,960 pages
2022: 12,304 pages
2021: 13,760 pages
2020: 24,878 pages
2019: 30,220 pages
2018: 40,519 pages
2017: 37,626 pages
The Genre Breakdown
To start with my usual disclaimer, it looks like nonfiction is even with fiction, but fiction is broken out into a million categories while nonfiction is not, so I did read significantly more fiction. What I'm calling "fiction" in the categories here is what falls under the sort of literary fiction umbrella where there's not another primary genre I can shelve it under" (so most of what I read). I wanted to stretch myself a bit more this year genre-wise, but I also like what I like, and that's okay. I am excited that I read more short story collections this year. I read less romance in years past, which has been a trend. I found romance a good bridge into the adult book world from YA, but I've found it's not really what I prefer reading, so that's dropped. I always try to read a YA or two a year to stay vaguely in touch with my roots. The sci-fi section is a stretch. Both of these books were very literary and probably not true genre fiction, but I'll take points for branching out wherever I can. I'm a lit fic girlie at heart, what can I say?
I don't break down my nonfiction because I don't review them on here or care as much about the nonfiction book world, honestly, so it feels simpler to keep to all lumped together.
Fiction: 49
Nonfiction: 41
Play: 1
Short Stories: 5
YA: 2
Poetry: 1
Romance: 1
Sci-Fi/Speculative: 2
Historical: 1
The Ratings Are In
My overall average rating is higher than last year coming in at 3.93. We're getting closer to being back to my 4 star overall rating from years past. I think this bump is largely due to reading fewer audiobooks. I'm a lot more likely to push through books I'm not enjoying when it's an audiobook playing in the background, but that doesn't mean that I'll rate it highly. I don't think that I found more of this year's books any better. I also think that my rereading might have bumped up this average because I tend to reread books I already love. I gave out 12 5 star reviews (granted I read Normal People twice again this year and gave it 5 stars both times). I'm much more likely to give a 4.5, and reviewing it now, there are books I gave a 5 that I would now give a 4.5 and vice versa. A 5 is so strongly vibes based at the end of reading, it's hard to know what books will stick with you in a lasting way when you've just finished it. The lowest rating I gave this year was a 2.5 to Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. I read it at the very start of the year and genuinely can't remember this one. The only note I left for myself was "I don't get this at all." So I can't tell you what didn't work for me beyond, all of it.
2017: 4.2
2018: 4.24
2019: 4.24
2020: 4.27
2021: 4.29
2022: 4.11
2023: 3.86
2024: 3.93
When They Were Published
A lot of my reading trends towards front list new releases because those are the books the bookish internet is talking about, and I always want to be in on the fun. Because of this, about half the books I read were released in 2024 at 53 total. As for the oldest book I read this year? That goes to After You'd Gone by Maggie Nelson, which was published in 2000. I tend to get most of my backlist books in from picking up novels I meant to read in years past or from authors I've newly discovered where I want to read their whole catalog.
My Best Months
There are certain months that carry my entire reading goal for the year and others that were major slumps. My summer job is always quite busy and demanding, so those have been my slump months the last few years. The year started off strong because I was freshly energized about reading and writing, I had a long commute I could read during, and I read a lot of audiobooks. During the summer, the audiobooks fell away, and I had less time to myself moving home and starting full time work. November and December, I had a lot more time than the rest of the year as work got spottier, so I was able to really sink back into books for the end of the year.
January: 11 books
February: 12 books
March: 18 books
April: 9 books
May: 5 books
June: 5 books
July: 4 books
August: 6 books
September: 4 books
October: 4 books
November: 13 books
December: 13 books
All The Formats
Like genres, despite how this looks at first glance, I don't read most books on audio. I read a lot less audiobooks this year because I moved back home after the first few months of the year, and I didn't have as much time to fill on my own. I also got back into podcasts (and found a lot of great bookish ones) that took up the time I used to listen to audiobooks. The ebooks are high this year because in the first half of the year pretty much my only access to books was through the digital library and Libby and then my October reading was largely comprised of ebooks I bought for convenience for my trip to Europe. I still can't decide if I like physical or digital books more. I could make arguments for both! Hardcovers comes in so high because I got a lot of books from the library in the second half of the year, and those tend to be hardcovers (though they are occasionally paperbacks). It's been so lovely having access to the physical library again, especially because having the actual book in hand is so much more fun for blogging and bookstagram.
Audiobook: 37 books
Ebook: 23 books
Paperback: 15 books
Hardback: 25 books
I also think it's important to look at where these books came from. The bookish internet is huge on book buying, which is amazing if you have the funds and space for it. I sadly do not and would go broke with this hobby if I was buying a $30 hardcover every time I wanted to read a book, so my habit is largely supported by the library. You can see an overwhelming amount came from the library, both digitally and physically. Then I did read more ARCs this year, which I'm incredibly thankful to publishers for sending to me. They're the only form of payment I ever get for this work, so I'm grateful for the chance to read early and for free every so often. I've had an amazing year of publicists reaching out, and I'm extremely grateful for that. I've been blogging a long time, but I'm still surprised every time I get recognized since I'm mostly based on a platform that's largely seen as unfashionable (but you'd be surprised how many people still read these reviews every month). The owned books are a bit deceptive. I think I bought maybe 10 books this year, and that's likely an overestimate, so the majority of books that I owned here were also counting rereads and rereads of rereads that I've had on my shelf for years.
ARCs: 7 books
Library: 78 books
Owned: 17 books (this is actually smaller than it looks because it's counting multiple re-reads)
I started tallying this last year, and I want to carry on the tradition of sharing how much I've saved by using the library. This isn't an exact calculation. I'm not going to look up the exact prices in the exact formats I read all these books in. For the sake of the exercise, most new adult fiction hardcovers are about $30. That's a nice round number, so we'll multiply that times my number of library loans to get $2,340 saved by using the library. When you start reading more than 12 or so books a year, using your library can lead to major savings.
The Longest and The Shortest
This is always a funny one to look at. The average length of the books I read was 304 pages per book, but as you will see in a second, that average comes from books with sprawling range. The longest book I read was 752 pages from The Nix by Nathan Hill. Nathan Hill is a wonderful author, but his books are incredibly wrong. He's one of the few authors I can tolerate that from because I can tend to feel claustrophobic in really long books. The only other book that came close was just over 600 pages, but it was a nonfiction title I read as an audiobook, so the length was less noticeable. There were plenty of candidates for short books, but nothing could rival Mr. Salary by Sally Rooney, which is an individually bound short story that came in at 32 pages. I heavily debated not tracking this one because I don't track the one-off short stories I read all the time, but since they bound this up, I'm calling it a book. That's the most ridiculously short offering for sure.
My Blogger Report Card
I'm thrilled with how this year on the blog went. December, I had my highest readership ever, with other 30,000 views over the course of the month. To think that last year, I was amazing to be getting 10,000 views. My average count over the last few months has been double that figure. Thank you all for reading, supporting, and finding my reviews and book guides helpful. It truly means the world to me.
I've treated blogging more like a job this year than I ever did in college, and it's been really lovely to see that rewarded in reaching more readers. I had an amazing reading year which made me excited to write posts. I did a better job of managing the release of these posts, because experience taught me that I tend to read in clumps and then have long spells of not finishing a book. That awareness made it easier to pace reviews, even though I wanted to share them all at once. I've kept the love for blogging that I found at the end of 2023 going all year, and I don't see that fading any time soon. I appreciate every single one of you who read my posts so much. Thanks for an incredible year.
Comments
Post a Comment