2023… What a year. Trying to summarise it feels impossible, as it was filled with such beautiful moments of happiness and love and yet also filled with such anxiety and feelings of unending sadness.This duality however, led to an interesting year for reading and was one that I read what I would consider a lot in! So I figured I’d do a little wrap-up of some of the interesting statistics from the year, because I genuinely find them so interesting, helped by the wonderful CAWPILE spreadsheet I’ve been keeping over the year thanks to the amazing G from bookroast on insta and youtube!
In 2023 I read a grand total of 106 books, making it my biggest yearly total since 2020 where I managed 104 books! My best reading months were tied, May and August where I read 16 books. These were months in which I was off of work, May due to being signed off long term due to stress and burnout and August because of the summer holidays, so you can really see that I use reading as a form of escapism! My worst reading month was actually January in which I read only 3 books, and I think this was due to stress and reading some very dense books that I really struggled to get through (The Atlas Paradox and Babel) and genuinely probably just picked up at the wrong time.
This was also the year I got into audiobooks, and I read a total of 10 audiobooks (100+ hours of listening), thanks to an audible subscription and Spotify starting an audiobook service! Though I found out the hard way on NYE that Spotify only gives you 15 hours of listening per month unless you buy more and had to frantically dig out my physical copy of A Little Life to finish before the year ended! Which I managed to do with 4 hours to spare before the countdown started, a relief as I hate going into a new year or month with a book leftover, I love a fresh start.
This year I read mostly standalone books, totalling 61 and 45 books in a series! 29 of these were the starting book in a series, 6 were me finishing a series and 4 of the series I have read I have decided to no longer continue and DNF the series! I DNF the series either because I was happy with where the first book ended and genuinely can’t see the benefit of continuing it, because I’m just not interested in more of it and struggled to get through the other books, or because I just can’t see myself buying the rest (unfortunately some book box ones fall into this category easily).
In what will come as a surprise to no-one, my top genre of 2023 was fantasy books with a massive 41 books falling mainly under this category, with contemporary and mythology coming in second and third place! In total I read 17 different genres, and really enjoyed diving into romance this year, something I hope to continue in 2024.
I only read 2 translated books this year, both from Japanese which is surprising as I thought I’d read more, but I’m now just realising that what I actually mean is that I bought a lot and haven’t got around to reading them yet. So hopefully I’ll read more translated works in 2024, especially from Japanese as there’s something I truly love about Japanese fiction - there’s a particular kind of melancholy I get while I read it that I just don’t feel in reading works originally in English.
My average rating this year was 4 stars with 37 books falling into this category, and 18 5 star reads! I’ll go into some of these in another post focusing on my favourite books of the year - though I would like to point out that this isn’t a reliable statistic as I often inflate the ratings of non-fiction, biographical and poetry/graphic novel works as I find them difficult to rate because they’re totally different to the novels I’m used to reading. Therefore, they often end up in the 5 star category! So looking it over I’d say that realistically I had around 9 true 5 stars of the year!
This year I also drifted from YA, with 70 of my reads falling into the category of adult fiction. I read 28 YA books, and the majority of these I would say came from book box subscriptions so not necessarily works I was going out of my way to buy. I predict that in 2024 I’ll read even more adult fiction, and potentially cancel my fairyloot YA subscription because I find a lot of the books I don’t care for now, though they’re still gorgeously done!
The majority of books I read were also published this year, so I’d say I stayed fairly on trend with new releases with 57 books I read published in 2023, and 22 published in 2022! Most of the books I read also featured LGBT+ characters, 52 having a character within the story as LGBT+ and 13 featuring the MC as LGBT+. For the majority, there were multiple LGBT+ characters or identities occurring, and the biggest single categories were lesbians and bisexuality, coming in at 16 and 11 books respectively. I’m really happy that there was so much LGBT+ representation in my reading this year and hope the trend continues next year!
The disability rep however was significantly less, with only 8 books featuring disabled characters and 7 featuring a disabled MC. This is something I’d love to do better on so if you know of any books with disabled characters please do let me know!
Looking towards authors, I mainly read from new authors this year! With 95 authors in total this year, 64 of these were new authors to me which I really like as I felt I was introduced to a lot of new styles, and some of my best books of the year are from debut authors! Of the authors I read from this year, 91 were women which is amazing! 25 of the authors are authors of colour, which I feel I could read more by authors of colour next year. I also found I mainly read from American authors, with 46 of the authors turning out to be American. This is slightly disappointing and I want to make sure that I read more from British authors as well as authors of other nationalities next year.
So there’s my little reading wrap-up for 2023, I hope you found it as interesting as I have! I’m setting my goal for 2024 at 52 books again because I really enjoyed the 1 a week challenge, even though I smashed that, it was interesting to see how many a week I was doing. I doubt I’ll get to 100 in 2024 and I hope not as I tend to read more when I’m not doing well mentally, so I think 52 is a realistic goal for me that feels challenging enough while achievable! Let me know what your goal is this year!
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