Hi, friends! I’m finally finishing up my “Best of 2023” series… in mid-January. This is the latest I’ve ever been writing these posts, so I hope you will indulge me in one more look back on my reading year with my reading stats post. As a reminder, I keep a very detailed spreadsheet (which I’m happy to send to anyone who wants it!), which helps me put this post together. The spreadsheet lists out the book title, author, page count, my rating, when I started and finished a book, and other details like if it’s a debut, if it’s diverse, where I sourced the book from, etc.
Now, let’s dive into what my 2023 reading year looked like!
Nitty-Gritty Details
- Number of books read: 117 (-7 from 2022)
- Number of pages read: 40,435 (-2,364 from 2022)
- Money spent on books I read this year: $374.81 (-$50.18). This amounts to $3.20 per book.
- Percentage of books by and about BIPOC and the LGBTQIA+ community: 30, or 26% (-12% from 2022—ugh)
- Number of books abandoned: 14 (-1 from 2022)
Format Breakdown
This was so interesting to me because while my print reading didn’t change too much from 2022 to 2023 (+2.3%), my audiobook reading came in second place for the first time ever! It bumped up from 22.6% to 30.8%! And my e-book reading went down over 10% from 2022. Crazy!
Genre Breakdown
| Genre | Percentage | Average Rating |
| Romance | 32% | 3.6 |
| General Fiction | 22% | 4.0 |
| Thriller | 15% | 4.1 |
| Nonfiction | 15% | 4.0 |
| Historical Fiction | 9% | 3.8 |
| YA | 4% | 3.6 |
| Fantasy | 1% | 3.0 |
Romance was once again my highest-read category—but down 1% from 2022 and my average rating was down .2 from 2022! A 3.6 rating is not great for me. General fiction was way up (9%!) although the average rating came down (from 4.7 in 2022, which is an astonishingly high rating). Thrillers were up 4% and the rating came down .1 from 2022—not too bad, there. Nonfiction came down 3% and the rating also came down by .2. Historical fiction went up by 1% but the better news is that I picked much better historical fiction novels in 2023—my rating was up .8 from 2022! Another surprising stat was YA. My percentage came down 12% (!) and my rating also came down by .5. It was not the year of YA for me, it seems. And finally, I only read one fantasy book this year, which I gave 3 stars.
Source Breakdown
Even though I love buying books, I’m pleased to see that I’m still getting over half of my reads from the library. (I get almost all of my audiobooks from the library and most of the romances I read.) My second most popular source was Amazon, but that percentage was down 5% from 2022. Book of the Month (BOTM) and indie bookstores were both up 2%, which was good to see. Target was down by .6%. And some of the smaller categories include Barnes & Noble, gifted books, Thriftbooks, and Spotify.
Month Breakdown
Pretty stable throughout the year! The most books I read in a month was 11 (January, July, August, and November) and the least was 8 (September, October). I’m guessing football is the reason my reading went down so much in September/October. I try to read while I’m watching the games, but I’m not always successful so that removes a whole day from my reading schedule.
Ratings Breakdown
I read a lot of 4- and 5-star books this year—almost 72% of the books I read! And that’s up 3% from 2022! However, my 5-star ratings decreased by 7.3% while my 4-star ratings increased by 10.4% (!!). My 3-star ratings decreased by 6.1% while my 2-star ratings increased by 3%. So maybe I felt more comfortable rating books 2 stars rather than giving them 3 stars? And maybe I also had a hard time giving a book that 5-star designation so I opted for 4 stars. This year, I want to track the half-stars I give a book so we’ll see how that shakes things out in 2024.
Days to Read
I don’t read fast these days and that’s because I’m usually reading multiple books at one time, and I’m very slow with my audiobook reading. (They have to compete with podcasts so I generally only listen to 1-2 hours of my audiobook per day.) This chart is about on par with what I did in 2022.
New Release vs. Backlist
I’m about 50/50 on my new release vs backlist books! I used to read a lot more backlist, but things keep trending toward more new release books every year. In 2023, my new release reading went up by 4.2%. Between 2022 and 2023, my new release reading went up by 10%!
Odds and Ends
- Oldest book (by pub date): A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1947)
- Newest book (by pub date): The Woman in Me by Britney Spears (October 24, 2023)
- Author I read the most: Julia Quinn (3)
- Book I spent the most money on: Happy Place by Emily Henry and The 1619 Project ($23)
- Time spent listening to audiobooks: 345 hours, 41 minutes (which is 55 hours, 31 minutes more than last year!)
- Longest book: America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray (606 pages)
- Shortest book: Have I Told You This Already? by Lauren Graham (183 pages)
- Book that took me the longest to read: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (65 days)
I don’t track how long it takes me to read books, but ATGIB must have been my longest read as well. I was very strict about keeping with the CBBC schedule and not reading ahead.
When do you listen to audiobooks? I only listen when I’m walking, driving, cleaning, and sometimes while cooking. I’m always surprised by how much listening time I end up with. I started a 6 hour audiobook on Saturday and I’m surprised that I only have 1.5 hours left to go. I would have thought that it would have taken me much longer to get through it.
I’m listening ALL the time! Walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, sometimes during certain work tasks, showering, getting ready, playing games on my phone… HA. So much listening time! I think if I just listened to audiobooks, I’d get through a few a week but my podcasts take priority.
OMG… all the detail… I LOVE IT!!!!!! Does your spreadsheet create all these charts? Are you in MENSA? OMG – I’m so impressed!!!! – AND also with all the reading! so many books! I hit 78 (I think) & that was a stellar year for me.
HAHA – I have to create the charts myself and I am definitely not smart enough for MENSA, sigh. But it brings me great joy to put this post together ever year!
This is very detailed and interesting – I should be more detailed in my spreadsheet!
I love a detailed, organized spreadsheet!
Oh I love those stats. Thank you for sharing.
I used to read mainly backlist titles because I don’t care about going with the trends but lately I did read more books that were released recently. I don’t always like those. I guess I am not into the hype and if I hear too much about a book I have higher expectations or feel I am more strict in rating.
My longest book would probably also be ATGIB very closely followed by Braiding Sweetgrass which I still haven’t finished.
It’s hard to not fall into reading what’s new and everyone is talking about, I totally get it! I like having a mix of backlist titles and new releases in my yearly reads.
I obviously love this since I use your spreadsheet and track the same things. I don’t track how long it takes me to read a book, though, because I just can’t be bothered. LOL. I’m pretty sure it probably would correlate pretty strongly with how many books I read in a month. This year I added number of hats to the spreadsheet.
It really did take us a long time to get through ATGIB, didn’t it?
I loved the slow pace of ATGIB! It was nice to read just a little bit every week.
The book it took me the longest to read was Bleak House by Charles Dickens! I read it over the course of 11 months with the from the front porch Patreon group and I was so glad when it was over because it was such a slog!!!
I love that you track all these details! Your audio book listening really went up! Did you make an intentional change so you’d read for audiobooks or was it just the way the year shook out?
11 months! That’s crazy!
Regarding audiobooks, I used to only listen to 2 audiobooks a month, but now I’m listening to 3-4 because I’m listening at a faster speed (typically 1.75x but I can go up to 2x for some narrators) and if a book is particularly long (more than 12 hours), I’ll try to listen to 1.5-2 hours per day rather than my typical 1 hour. So I think that’s how I listened to more audiobooks in 2023!
Your stats are impressive, Stephany.