Reading Roundup Year in Review 2023/24

I first started tracking my reading when I went away to college in 2007. Thus, my "reading year" starts about the same time the school year does, turning over in September, and now it's time for my ever-popular annual stats post.

I read 132 books this year, just below last year's 134. COVID year aside, a very clear level is emerging for the amount of reading I can do as a parent:

Discounting 2019/20, I am averaging 136 books per year following the birth of my first child, a number I have never been more than ten away from.

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Doctor Who*	22	1.8	16.7%
Star Trek	5	0.4	3.8%
Star Wars†	1	0.1	0.8%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	28	2.3	21.2%
Oz	12	1.0	9.1%
Lois McMaster Bujold	3	0.3	2.3%
Brandon Sanderson	2	0.2	1.5%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	40	3.3	30.3%
General SF&F Subtotal	57	4.8	43.2%
Black Panther†	4	0.3	3.0%
Other Marvel Universe Comics	8	0.7	6.1%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.5%
Other DC Universe Comics	5	0.4	3.8%
Miracleman†	6	0.5	4.5%
Once & Future	3	0.3	2.3%
Saga	2	0.2	1.5%
Other Comics	7	0.6	5.3%
Comics Subtotal	37	3.1	28.0%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.8%
Other Literature	4	0.3	3.0%
General Literature Subtotal	5	0.4	3.8%
Nonfiction Subtotal	5	0.4	3.8%

* 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.

The biggest fluctuations from last year is that media tie-ins were 33.6%, but down to 21.2%; I read about the same number of Doctor Who books as last year, but Star Trek books were down quite a bit (13.4% to 3.8%). On the other hand, I read my first Star Wars book since February 2019! The gap was mostly filled by comics, which went from being 17.2% of my reading last year to 28.0% this year. As always, I wish I read more nongenre fiction... but you can't read more of everything!

Here's how those categories have changed over time:

You can really see how my reading diet shifted around 2017, thanks to finishing grad school and starting to read for the Hugos every year.

Those are stats I crunch myself; here are ones 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:

Here are their author breakdowns:

The two designated "Not a Person" are for duos; the pedants at LibraryThing maintain that a pair of people is not a person. (In both cases, both members of the pair are alive.)

I'm always surprised I haven't read more by female authors, but I guess the amount of contemporary sf&f written by women is counterbalanced by how few tie-ins and comic books are. Note that these charts are by author not books: 39.3% of the authors I read last year were women, but 33.6% of the books I read were by women, so apparently I had more repeat male authors. Both authors labeled "n/a" by LibraryThing were male/female duos.

A lot of different countries this year! Last year, US/UK authors made up 90% of my authors read, but this year they are down to 86%.

One statistic I enjoy a lot on LibraryThing is a breakdown of what you read by pages. This is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics and ebooks have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. Also, multi-author books like anthologies and comic book collections can only be attributed to one person. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read:

If we ignore Gary K. Wolfe (who edited two big anthologies I read, but did not actually write) and Tom & Mary Bierbaum (who received the primary credit on a comic book collection that actually had many writers), my number one author by pages was John R. Neill; I read four Oz books by him. It's also interesting to see who placed high with just one book, such as Charles Dickens, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Charlie Kaufman.

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

Last year, I read twice as much sf as fantasy; this year, fantasy just edges out sf. The series I read the most of by pages is, not surprisingly, "Nonestica," which is the overall designation I give L. Frank Baum's fantasy universe that includes Oz.

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

It's not exactly shooting down, but you can see it really is decreasing slowly but steadily from its peak around August 2022.

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, 2022/23. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)