Reading Roundup Year in Review 2024/25

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, and so every September, I crunch the numbers on last year's reading.

Last year, I pointed out that since becoming a parent, my number of books per year had been fairly steady (except for the pandemic year)... this year proved that false!

114 books makes this my worst year since I began tracking other than the pandemic year. I had some very bad months in there: only 5 in October, just 3 in February! If both of those had been, say, 11 (which was my average the other ten months of the year), I would have finished at the much more respectable 128. Alas!

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Star Trek†	15	1.3	13.2%
Doctor Who*†	12	1.0	10.5%
Star Wars	1	0.1	0.9%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	28	2.3	24.6%
Oz	11	0.9	9.6%
Lois McMaster Bujold	2	0.2	1.8%
Robert A. Heinlein	2	0.2	1.8%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	32	2.7	28.1%
General SF&F Subtotal	47	3.9	41.2%
Marvel Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.6%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.8%
Other DC Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.6%
Other Comics†	5	0.4	4.4%
Comics Subtotal	13	1.1	11.4%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.9%
Other Literature	3	0.3	2.6%
General Literature Subtotal	4	0.3	3.5%
Pelican History of England	9	0.8	7.9%
Other Nonfiction	13	1.0	11.0%
Nonfiction Subtotal	22	1.8	18.9%

* 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.

I read a lot more nonfiction this year; the trade-off for that seems to have been that I read fewer comics. Given how much longer it takes to read a single nonfiction book than a single comic collection, no wonder my numbers were down! 

As you can see here, that's the most nonfiction I've read in a single year since I read for my Ph.D. exams! Other than that, though, things seem pretty stable the last few years.

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's their breakdowns by author. (Note that these are about authors, not books by authors, if you see the distinction.) First, what countries did my authors originate from:

The ratios are roughly in line with previous years; usually over half of my authors are U.S., with about third from the U.K., and then a smattering from other countries. (The "not set" is Michael Kelahan, who edited an anthology I read, and about whom I can literally find no information. I kind of suspect he may be a house name.)

Next, did I read books by living or dead authors:

My ratio of dead authors was slightly higher than normal, I think mostly because all eight authors of The Pelican History of England were dead. There were two authors I could find no data on in this regard: Kelahan again and Gilbert M. Sprague, who wrote an Oz book I read to my kids. (My guess is that Sprague is dead, but given I found multiple obituaries for people named Gilbert M. Sprague, I can't prove which one, if any, is the Oz author.) The "Not a Person" is James S.A. Corey, writer of The Expanse. (LibraryThing says that a group of people is not a person, which I guess is technically correct.)

And here's by gender:

I'd be curious to see how this differs by category; I suspect that if you removed tie-in books, my gender breakdown would be a lot more equal. (The "n/a" is once again James S.A. Corey.)

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:

There is no author I like more than David Mack, evidently. What I find noteworthy are the two authors who landed in my top ten on the basis of a single book: Charles Dickens and Howard Zinn.

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

Clearly, science fiction dominates. Last year, fantasy was very close to sf, but this year there is a marked difference, and nonfiction just edges out fantasy. I read quite a bit of Star Trek, of course, and much more history than I normally do.

Finally, here's how many book are on my "To be read" list:

I was on a good track, but that slight upward curve is concerning!

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, 2023/24. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)