2023 Reading Stats!

   

Now that all of my best books of 2023 posts are up, I can share the final post of my 'end of year' posts: my 2023 reading stats! This is one of my favorite posts to do every year because I love seeing all the ways my reading has changed (or stayed the same!) and what my reading year looked like as a whole. 

To put this post together, I take some graphics from my Goodreads year in review to share some general stats Goodreads keeps track of, and the rest are from an Excel spreadsheet that I keep throughout the year to track all the books I read! This is where I track things like page counts, book format, where I got the books, etc. Let's dive in!

136 books is truly a success for me this year, especially given what a bad year it was for me, haha. I have no complaints and I am incredibly surprised by this number. I once again have to say that I think audiobooks really contributed to that this year since I was able to listen to them so much while I did other things–I'm so glad I finally managed to get into them more over the past couple years!

I always forget just how long those books are by Justin Call! They are long, but so worth the read. Anoka was also a fantastic collection of short horror stories. 

This isn't all that surprising, as I'd say the 300 range is a fairly average page count for most books.

This was my average rating for last year, as well! It's always probably a little inflated since I tend to round up ratings on Goodreads.

Well, I'm not surprised that Pachinko is such a highly shelved book, as it was a finalist for the National Book Award and has it's own TV adaptation now (which I haven't watched)! It seems to be a very beloved book. I think Whispers from the Poisoned Isle needs more rep on Goodreads, too!


I had to include this stat this year because I am so pleased to see this book is still sitting at a 4.67 average rating, which is crazy! (!)

Stats:
Here we have the nitty-gritty details of what I read this year, from genre to page count and more. I always like to compare this to my previous year's post and see what changes have occurred. Maybe one year I'll compare to the first stats post I did however many years ago, but that's a whole other project. Anyway, let's have a look at this year's stats:

Genre

None of these are a really a huge surprise, but there are still some minor shifts in genres happening. Fantasy (38.6%) is still my top genre, but it is a bit lower than 2022. This is probably somewhat in part due to horror's (25%) gradual rise, up from 17% last year–which is a decent increase. I've been really loving horror more these days and I think that will continue to be the case. Sci-fi (12.1%) is relatively the same with only a one percent increase. Literary fiction is at 6.1%, historical the same at 6.1%, and dark romance has a small increase to 9.8% this year. Those were likely also due to my newfound love of audiobooks and need for some 'fun' books this year when I just needed something to escape with, haha. It's mainly interesting to see how my fantasy category has gotten down to 38% when it used to almost always be close to 50%!

Target Audience

This isn't surprising at all. I mainly read adult books (91.2%), and only read the occasional young adult (4.4%) and  middle grade (4.4%). I don't tend to find myself drawn to young adult books as much these days, but I do love middle grade so would like to maybe increase that number this year in 2024.

Format

There are actually some pretty big changes here. Hardcover went from 22% last year to 6.7% this year! I think that's actually because I wasn't able to use my library for a good portion of 2023 and that's typically where I read the most hardcover books. Physical ARCs is the same at 25%, while audiobooks changed from 25% last year to 36% of my total reading formats this year, which is pretty nuts. I used to not be able to focus on audiobooks at all, so the fact that they accounted for 36% of my reading last year is crazy and makes me glad that I've been able to start enjoying them. I'm not sure why I separated Ebooks (2.2%) and eARCs (18.5%) this year (?), but altogether they accounted for about 20% of my reading. Paperbacks come in at just 10% as well. 

Book Source

The saddest part about this graph is how low my library usage (14.6%) was last year. I'm planning to get back to my library more in 2024, which I've missed dearly. A lot of my reading does consist of ARCs, which often come from the publisher/author (32.3%) or NetGalley (23.8%). I also had an Audible (15.4%) membership for some of the year and managed to get some great deals on books from that so thought it'd be a good newer category to separate out from others. It would also probably be better to focus on reading more books that I already own in 2024, since I only read about a total of 13% of books I already owned in 2023, apparently...

Page Count

Page count is usually the chart that stays pretty consistent year to year, but it's still a fun one to track. I didn't read any 900+ page books last year, but I'm hoping to find some chunky tomes this year to tackle, as I usually like to make some big books little project for me to read through throughout the year. It actually seems like I read slightly less shorter books this year than in 2022, but no major changes here.  

Tell me about your year in books! Do you keep track of information for stats like this? If you do and you made a post that I haven't seen–or any type end of year post–leave me a link below because I love checking them out!