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 was distressed to note that I'd fallen a bit below my post-pandemic average of 134 books per year... this year I am happy to note that I had my best year since 2016/17! (I spent that school year commuting via bus, so I got a lot of reading done... on the other hand, my audiobook and podcast listening fell off a lot.) The only other year to beat this year is 2012/13, when I read for my Ph.D. exams.
The key to success is, of course, read more comic books.
* 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.
It wasn't just comics, though; my tie-in reading was in general up this year, as I worked through a bunch of Star Trek and Star Wars books I got like a decade ago but never got around to. (In Star Wars, I have not yet gotten up to the Disney era still!) I can read a 300-page Star Trek book much faster than a 300-page original novel.
(One notes that there are previous years where the total doesn't add up to 100%. Apparently I made some data entry errors, but I am too lazy to track them down; I'm sure this is good enough.) This was Star Trek's best year since 2007/08, and Star Wars's best since 2013/14; I had gone five years with no Star Wars books at all. My combined comics went from 9.7% last year to 27.8% this year.
It might look like my general sf&f reading went down, but that's only in terms of share; in raw numbers, it actually went from 47 to 50! I just read more other stuff this year.
Those are stats I crunch myself (with the help of ChatGPT); 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 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:
My U.S. share is a tad bigger than previous years, I'm guessing because of all the tie-ins I read. My U.K. share is substantially smaller. My nine "others" were one each from Croatia, India, New Zealand, Mexico, Ghana, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Israel, plus one "not set." (I am a bit skeptical of some of these identifications; Michel Faber, for example, hasn't lived in the Netherlands since he was seven, and has published every single one of his books since moving to the U.K., in English. Is he really a Netherlands author? I feel like some Thingamabarians just want excuses to pick "interesting" countries.)
Most of my books were by living authors, which is normal.
Men always dominate my reading, but this is their highest year since I started doing these graphs, in 2020/21. Again, it's probably all the tie-ins and comics I was reading. I actually read more women authors this year than last (it went from 33 to 39, which actually ties my previous record); I just read
more more male authors this year too (from 56 to 87).
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:
Keith Giffen did not write all of the two (very large) comic collections where he is first credited author, so once you remove him, David Mack is my favorite author two years running! Joey Cavalieri and Jack Kirby are the other two dubious inclusions in the top ten; Cavalieri wrote just one issue in a 1,438-page collection, but it's the first one, so my method of cataloguing on LT gives him credit for the whole volume. Kirby wrote more of the Panther's Prey Omnibus, but not even a majority of it, I don't think.
The highest-placed author to get on the chart through just a single book is Ada Palmer. She beats out John Jackson Miller, who wrote four!
My tagging on books gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes:
Science fiction dominates, of course; lots of comics there, too, and if all comic collections were paginated, it would be even higher.
Finally, here's how many book are on my "To be read" list:
I've sort of plateaued recently. Hopefully I can get it down. At least I haven't crossed the dreaded 700 Barrier!
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, 2025/25. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)
