2023 Reading Stats+ 2024 Reading Goals

HAPPY NEW YEAR to 2024! Can you believe that we have reached a New Year? I feel like 2023 just breezed by. I do think as I get older, the years just go by faster. This year I wanted to share my reading stats for the year. I will also be sharing my bookish goals for 2023 as well. But I wanted to share my total stats for the year in various areas and if I accomplished my goals for the year. So I will be sharing all of my charts from my spreadsheet for you.

2023 Reading Stats

Yearly Basic Totals:

Books Read: 500

Books Re Read: 41

Books Acquired: 94

Pages Read: 133,116

Average Rating: 4.2

Book Size and Format:

So for this section is the books size, format and how I acquired the book. My largest amount of books and pages read was in August with it being over 13,445 pages read. As you can see my KU reading went through the roof haha with close ties of reading books either purchased or already owned and library books. For the total year my average of pages tended to be around 350-400! As I read mostly novels which always tend to be between 300-400 I am not surprised by that. Although I was good about reading books bigger than that as well. Its no surprise that digital books comprise of my majority of reading. I am not a big fan of reading print that much.

My Longest Book Read: Family Ties (682 Pages)

Longest Audiobook: Consider Me (1260 Minutes)

Shortest Book: Beware of Maverick (24 Pages)

Shortest Audiobook: Wrapped up In You (60 Minutes)

Book Genres

I really tended to go with contemporary and dark romance as those were pretty equal. I am very impressed with focusing on more suspense this year and my historical reading was more than I expected it to be. I do want to be better about fantasy and paranormal romance though in the upcoming year.

Ratings

So wow! My 5 stars were so many this year! I was really impressed with how that has been growing. Each year it gets a little higher percentage wise. I mean almost 30% of my reading were five stars. That just means my quality of reading is going up in some ways. 4 Stars are still the main rating I do most of the time, that doesn’t surprise me.

Publishers and Sources

So what I am seeing with the results for the year on this one is that I really focused on self published authors haha My trad pub reading has gone down. I am not shocked by that at all. I have been enjoying more self published works and it matches with the new releases too I have been focusing more on. I do want to be more balanced where this is concerned in 2024 but I will be honest self published authors as far as their writing, just really does so much more for me personally. So we shall see.

Books Read by Month

Well obviously the books I read the most in was August but my best listens amount were in October. My worst month of reading is December lol I just mostly do rereads in December as its the busiest month of the year for me especially with all the end of year posts I do both on here and bookstagram.

Stat Details on Books and Authors Read:

Authors

# of Authors Read: 184

Most Read Author: Ryan Michele

Debut Authors: 2

New To Me Authors: 24

For authors, I really got to so many good ones. My most read is Ryan Michele. I really just went through most of her backlisted books. Really have missed the MC gritty style.

Series

Number of Series: 218

Standalone: 57

!st Books: 13

2nd Books: 13

3rd Books: 10

4th or Higher: 299

As you can see here, I really focused on finishing off series and reading some standalones. I didn’t start too many new series this year.

Diversity

So this section is just interesting to see how much I have read. I don’t seek out diverse books, but I do stumble across it all the time without meaning to actually. Which I think raises the quality of reading, at least for me personally. I do like to track it in my spreadsheet though just to see where its at. So for this year I read 201 diverse books and so my total percentage is 41%. That is REALLY good. I didn’t even do that much when I was focusing on reading diverse books a few years ago. So I do love just reading a more balanced reading because you do run into diverse books all the time.

Genres

So the numbers I have is what I got for the genres that I read. There are some that I need to focus more on. But I was pretty good about some of the others.

Contemporary: 101

Dark Romance: 101

Historical: 74

PNR: 55

Romantic Suspense: 41

Mythological Fantasy: 13

Romantic Comedy: 13

Urban Fantasy: 2

Inspirational: 5

Sci Fi: 24

So as you can see here my focus was really contemporary and dark romance. I was disappointed by the fantasy numbers and want to read more fantasy in 2024.

2024 Reading Goals

I am so ready for the NEW YEAR1 I can’t tell you all how ready I am for it. It has been a long year in 2023 and this last week I swear is the worst week of the year because you just want to start up the new year right? I am not sure if you all do anything for New Years. I really just relax on New Years Eve, do some reading to get a ahead for the New Year but do a nice meal of chicken and dumplings and then toast to the new year with Sparkling Cider/Juice. Not sure if you all know what that is haha Its a non alcoholic beverage that is probably the closest us Mormons get to drinking champagne. Its basically juice or apple cider mixed with some bubbles. The brand we use and is probably in your nearby store is called Martinellis. And its super delicious. At least with a Martinelli I will remember everything haha

My Goals for the Year:

Read More Books!!!! –I still can’t believe how much I was able to read in 2023 and so for 2024 I want to aim even higher. I know I know I am crazy lol but I haven’t read 600 books since before blogging. So I am curious if I can do it. I did get to 500 pretty easily this year so I do want to stretch myself. Its about 50 books a month, and I did close to that almost every month so I do think its possible.

Reading Challenges: So I am not going crazy on reading challenges if I am being honest. I am really just going to focus on the Storygraph ones and Romanceopoly and my Goodreads challenge. Technically Romanceopoly is only through Storygraph. Not sure what happened to their site but half of it is down. But they did update the challenge for Storygraph with new descriptions of prompts so that is interesting. And if you need a link to the Notion tracker, let me know and I can send you the template for it! Its really great if you want to digitally play. And if you want a copy of the PDF of the board and cards I have that saved (thank goodness) I am actually thinking of getting it into a real game board. Since I love doing it so much. There are companies that will create game boards and things with whatever you want for it. So that is really cool.

Buddy Reads: I was able to do quite a few buddy reads this year and would like to do it again in 2024. Its so fun reading a book with someone and seeing different perspectives on it.

Series: Focus on finishing off more series. I really was great about that this year and would like to be even better this year. I will be rotating out my reading every week to be a bit more balanced.