I read more books than last year (that is, 2024), which I'm happy about. My reading goal is always 50 books a year, so that hasn't changed, and I don't see that changing. Unsurprisingly, the one book I didn't finish reading this year was a nonfiction book, and a religious one at that. Very par for the course there. That's only 1 DNF, though, compared to last year's 3.
In terms of books bought, I again counted only the books I bought for myself that cost money. I fucked up by shopping B&N's half-off-hardcovers sales a couple of times. Oh well. Here's the chart my reading spreadsheet from BookRiot calculated for me of where my books purchases came from.
Speaking of my BookRiot reading log spreadsheet, I've been searching for next year's in their website, and I don't see it! Are they not making one for 2026??? I mean I have reading journals I'm planning on using, but I really love their reading spreadsheets :( Maybe it's because the reading log sheet was originally made by Tirzah Pierce, and she no longer works for BookRiot? But they still made one for 2025...
Anyway, here are the statistics, charts and graphs from my 2025 reading log spreadsheet:
Genres: Fantasy is still my largest percentage, although it dropped from nearly 50 percent last year. A lot of the books I read fit into multiple genres, but the sheet only let me put one, so keep that in mind in terms of genre count. Science fiction has surpassed Romance to become my second-most-read genre for 2025! Last year it was only 3.6%, so it more than quadrupled! This is clearly due to my reading the Murderbot Diaries. Romance is my third-most-read genre at 11.1%; it was 16.4% last year. I read at least 1 more genre category this year than I did last year (9 vs. 8 in 2024).
Form: 89.3% of the books I read were prose, while novellas, short stories, and picture books shared equal pie slices at 3.6% each (I read 2 books from each of those categories).
Books read by month: I had two high-reads months instead of one like last year, reading 11 books in both February and October! I read zero books in August (my reading slump) but read pretty consistently throughout the other months (2-4 books a month).
Author/artist gender: The amount of female authors I read went up this year compared to last, with nonbinary authors and male authors tying for second!! Other refers to group authors and authors duos. I'm not sure why the sheet doesn't create an M/F category and an Other category instead of lumping them together, but whatever.
Nation of origin: A big jump in US books (going from about half last year to about ¾ths this year), while UK books consequently were halved. Canadian books also almost halved. I read 1 book set in Nigeria (Until the Last Petal Falls) and put Ireland as Carmilla's nation of origin since the author was Irish (according to Wikipedia the book seems to have been first published in London though... oh well).
Protagonists of color (erroneously put as POC Protagonists in the sheet) vs. white protagonists: I nearly doubled the amount of books with protagonists of color that I read (17.3% to 33.3%)! That still leaves two-thirds of the protagonists I read as white or I couldn't tell what they were. (e.g. Murderbot's race is never given, although a white actor plays it in the show and some official? illustrations show it with dark skin and hair. Its appearance is barely described at all.) If I make my own spreadsheet for next year, I'm including a n/a or unknown categories for the rep stats.
Authors of color (erroneously put as POC Authors) vs. white authors: (not in the above image) The amount of authors of color I read tripled compared to last year, but as that's going from 5.8% to 16.7%, it's not something to hugely celebrate. I need to do better.
Queer authors: This stat stayed basically exactly the same as last year, with only a 0.5% change! How funny. Insert my usual spiel about how you can't always tell if an author is queer just by looking at their author bio.
Books with queer protagonists: Remember how last year I had exactly a 50/50 split? This year 68.5% of the books I read had queer protagonists!
Books with trans rep: I don't trust the stats on this because they're collected weirdly, but according to the log I read 11 books with a trans protagonist (again thanks to the Murderbot Diaries as it's agender), and 20 with a trans author/artist. This is no doubt due to all the Sarah Wallace books I read, as the log counts them each time. I read 6 individual trans authors this year, which is down from last year's 7.
Books with disability rep: 46.3% of the books I read this year had disability rep, nearly twice as much as last year's 25%!
My sole translated book was Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos, which was originally in English but I bought in Spanish ostensibly for my sobrines (it's at my house and they have yet to see it lol).
An increase in nonfiction books read, at 12.5% (last year was 9.1%).
Also an increase in the amount of books for adults that I read, 83.9%, and consequent decreases for YA (7.1%, less than half of last year's!) and children's (8.9%). Last year the breakdown was 72.7% adult, 18.2% YA, and 9.1% children.
16.7% of the books I read were published this year, down from last year's 20.5%.
Wow, I really made some gains in diverse reading. Overall, a great reading year! Happy new year.
