Reading Roundup Year in Review 2022/23

For historical reasons, my "reading year" ends in August, beginning anew in September along with the new school year. So that's the time (rather than at calendar year's end) that I do a full post on my reading for the previous year.

Despite being a very focused, very deliberate reader, this year was slightly below my historical average:

I read 134 books, but my average is 147. That said, my post-move/job/kids average is 125, so I did better than that! I think I probably read an above-average number of omnibus collections this year, which would have deflated my numbers (e.g., a three-novel Philip K. Dick omnibus counts as one "book" for my purposes).

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Doctor Who*	27	2.3	20.1%
Star Trek	18	1.5	13.4%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	45	3.8	33.6%
Oz	12	1.0	9.0%
Pern	10	0.8	7.5%
Discworld†	5	0.4	3.7%
Naomi Novik	2	0.2	1.5%
Lois McMaster Bujold	2	0.2	1.5%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	25	2.1	18.7%
General SF&F Subtotal	56	4.7	41.8%
The Transformers	6	0.5	4.5%
Kieron Gillen	4	0.3	3.0%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.5%
Justice Society of America‡	2	0.2	1.5%
Other DC Universe Comics	5	0.4	3.7%
Marvel Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.2%
Harvey Pekar	1	0.1	0.7%
Comics Subtotal	23	1.9	17.2%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.7%
Other Literature	5	0.4	3.7%
General Literature Subtotal	6	0.5	4.5%
Nonfiction Subtotal	4	0.3	3.0%

* Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
† Nonfiction about a particular author or series is included with that series, not the "Nonfiction" category.
‡ Prose fiction based on a comics series is included with that series's main designation.

Finishing the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels brought Doctor Who from 24.1% of my total reading last year down to 20.1%. On the other hand, Star Trek books went from 0.7% up to 13.4%, and brought my overall tie-in rate from 24.8% to 33.6%! Son One and I read an Oz book a month, but that doesn't compete with last year's 2.2 per month. I continue to be bad at reading outside of genre, but was slightly better than last year.

Here's how those categories have changed over time:

General sf&f rules the roost these days.

Those are stats I crunch myself; here are one I used LibraryThing to generate. I make different choices between how I enter books on LibraryThing vs. in my personal files, so the total number of books will be slightly different. Here's how my books break down by original publication date:

As you can see, these are weighted toward recent books. It's definitely not perfectly correct, though; I read a Charles Dickens novel last year but it shows no pre-1900 books, so there's at least one book misplaced.

Here are their author breakdowns:

Note that these are weighted by author not by book. That is to say, 19% of the authors I read were dead, but 29% of the books I read were by dead authors, if that makes sense. (Mostly Ruth Plumly Thompson and Anne McCaffrey, I assume.)

My percentage of female authors is down from last year, but again compare female authors read (30%) with books by female authors read (38%).

Many fewer non-American authors this year than last.

One new statistic feature that LibraryThing introduced this year breaks down what you read by pages. Again, this is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read:

Pretty unsurprising to see Ruth Plumly Thompson crush it; I read twelve of her books this past year with my son. What's even more interesting to me is to see which authors got on this list with relatively few books. For example, I read just two books by Madeleine L'Engle... but each was an omnibus that collected four full novels. Or just two books by Naomi Novik, but one collected three novels. Ada Palmer, Brandon Sanderson, Gregory Benford, Charles Dickens, Mary Doria Russell, Rachel Hartman, and Wil Wheaton are all authors in my top twenty-five with only a single (non-omnibus) book.

My tagging on book gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes:

Science fiction dominates; I read more than twice as much sf than fantasy. My top series is Star Trek, but Doctor Who, Oz, Pern, Discworld, and the "Kairos" novels all fared well. I read more Pern than nonfiction, and more Deep Space Nine than literature!

And, finally, here's the number of books on my "To be read" list:

It's going down! It's really going down!! Made some good progress on it last year, and hopefully that continues this year.

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)