2024 Reading Stats

Here are my reading stats for this year.

• Total books read during this year: 52
• Total books that I started to read but didn't finish: 3
  
• physical books read: 20
  
• digital/ebooks read: 32
  
• physical books started but unfinished: 2
  
• ebooks started but unfinished: 1
  
• Library books read: 1 (a free book I read and put back lol)
  
• Library books started but unfinished: 0
  
• Books I loved: 11
• Books I liked: 26
• Books I felt neutral about: 10
  
• Books I disliked or found meh: 4
  
• Books I hated: 1. I hated it so much I didn't even count it in my stats
  
• Books I felt strongly about but can't classify as love or hate: 0
  
• Books purchased: 43 BUT that's not counting all the ebooks I bought with a Barnes & Noble giftcard I got from my work insurance's stupid logging health stuff app
• Books purchased that I actually read: 15  (see note above)
  
• #1 most loved book this year (not counting my rereads):
  
• most loved general fiction: Endpapers
  
• most loved fantasy: the Meddle & Mend series
  
• most loved mysteries: A Charm of Magpies series
  
• most loved young adult book/s: Most Ardently, The No-Girlfriend Rule
  
• most loved children's book/s: all the kids' books I read this year were rereads, oops
  
• most loved nonfiction: How to Keep House While Drowning

I read slightly fewer books than last year (that is, 2023) but still more than my reading goal of 50 books, so I'm happy. One of the books I didn't finish this year is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I started rereading for the 20th anniversary read-along; I hit a wall and took a break (of several months lol), but I finally finished it in mid-January. The other was a nonfiction book, a genre I have a history of DNFing even if I am very interested in the subject matter. The unfinished ebook is actually a Jeeves book that I started reading due to Letters Regarding Jeeves, which for some reason stopped sending chapters or anything at all in October. I'm sad about that. 

I only counted my book purchases that were not gifts and not bought with a giftcard; I have no idea just how many ebooks I bought or downloaded for free. I don't super care. I think it helped that I went to the thrift store way fewer times in 2024 than I did in 2023; I really was making an effort to purchase fewer physical books. 

Here are some of the charts from the excellent reading log google sheet from BookRiot that I use every year:

Here's my genres read breakdown. Nearly half of all the books I read were fantasy! Despite me counting the A Charm of Magpies series as my favorite mysteries, I put them down as fantasy in the google sheet as it only allows one genre to be selected; this is probably the case for several of the books I read. Interestingly, my second-most read genre, Romance, has the same exact percentage as "last" year's! 2023's second-most read genre was General Fiction, my third-most read genre in 2024, so the two obviously switched places. 

In terms of form, 96.4% of the books I read were prose, AKA all but two (1 poetry book and 1 short stories collection).

July was my best reading month, with a whopping 16 books read! Junior high reading behavior. 

click to embiggen

Author/Artist Gender: The amount of female authors I read went down slightly (from 54.2% to just under half), and the amount of male authors I read went down as well (from 35.6% to 29%), giving the nonbinary authors category room to more than double (8.5% last year)!! The "other" category is for probably just one book with two authors of different gender categories. 

Nation of Origin: Roughly the same as "last" year, with a slight decrease for USA and slight increases for UK- and Canada-set books, probably because the two books I read set in the Netherlands were not counted in the stats 🙄

POC Protagonists (should be Protagonists of Color) vs. White Protagonists: increase in white protagonists, decrease in protagonists of color :(

Weirdly, the placements of the charts shifted, so the POC Authors (authors of color) vs. White Authors chart isn't visible in the above screenshot. Also an increase in white authors and a decrease in authors of color :(

Queer Authors/Artists: over a third of my read authors were queer or LGBTQ+! "Last" year it was under 30%! 

I don't know if this is a glitch in the stats, but HALF of the books I read had queer/LGBTQ+ protagonists!! "Last" year it was 31.5%! 

Like last time, the Trans Authors/Artists pie chart cannot be trusted (partially because I read a ton of books by Sarah Wallace and they counted each one as an individual author). 7 of the authors I read were trans and/or nonbinary (8 if you count Emily Dickinson lol)! "Last" year I read 5 trans & nonbinary authors.

I read 8 books with trans protagonists, over twice as much as "last" year's 3! 

A fourth (25%) of the books I read had disability rep; "last" year it was 18.5%!

I read zero translated books this year, weirdly enough.

Only 9.1% of the books I read were nonfiction, down from "last" year. 

Nearly 3/4ths of the books I read (72.7%) were for adults; it was only over half "last" year. Consequently decreased percentages for young adult and children's books read: 18.2% for YA (was 25.5%) and 9.1% for children's books (was 21.8%!). 

Only about a fifth (20.5%) of the books I read in 2024 were published that year, a jump from "last" year's nearly 15%.

I really need to make an effort to read more books by and about people of color! Overall a great reading year though. I finally got a library card from my local public library, so hopefully that will keep me from buying so many books.