This is my fifth full-year round up, so I think you’ll know what to expect from it.
I’ve seen a lot of debate online recently about reading goals – many people can’t understand why anyone would make a goal as they find it takes the fun out of reading. I like goals, though, as they motivate me to read instead of scrolling on my phone and they encourage me to pick different things to read. If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it!
Goal: read at least 100 books
As always I set my initial goal at 100 books. By late December I was on something like 146 and had mentally made up my mind to reach for 150, so to motivate myself to really go for it I changed the goal online.
And… I made it – just. I finished book #150 on Hogmanay.
Aside from 2020 when I was off work for a huge chunk of the year this is my best result since having Brodie.
Goal: read more new books than rereads
I always caveat this goal by saying I LOVE rereading books and think that rereads can be just as beneficial as reading a new book. But, for me, I know it’s too easy to stick with books I know (and have often read many, many times) and not challenge myself with something new.
I did well with 111 new books and 39 rereads.
Amongst those were 53 new authors (and 82 different ones in total). Perhaps this goal could become more new books and new authors?
Some of them were responsible for my favourite reads this year – Lea Booth, Amber Eve, Bonnie Garmus, Casey McQuiston, AJ Pearce and Rainbow Rowell.
Amongst my reread books are some familiar author names to the blog.
Jodi Taylor (11 books), Donna Douglas (10 books), Roald Dahl (2 books) and of course Enid Blyton (12 books), but more on her later.
Goal: read some books I’ve always meant to
This one covers quite a few goals really. To read at least one grown-up classic (children’s classics are a bonus), to tick off books I’ve had on my list for a long time, to read books I’ve seen adapted for film or TV, and this year to read more of my favourite kind of book – books about bookshops or libraries!
I’ll start with the classics.
My grown-up classic was Wuthering Heights. I did not like it any more than I liked Jane Eyre. But at least I now know what it’s about and have an opinion if it comes up in conversation.
I also read a few children’s ones – Treasure Island (this also counts for the movie adaptations, as I watched The Muppets Treasure Island and the 1950 Disney movie shortly after reading the book), Anne of Green Gables, T H White’s Sword in the Stone ( another movie adaptation as it was the main inspiration for the Disney movie, which I adore), and a modern classic Because of Winn-Dixie.
Aside from the above books there wasn’t really anything I ticked off this year – certainly no big blockbuster reads like Jaws, Jurassic Park or the Dan Brown books. Similarly while there are other books I read which have movie or TV adaptations I haven’t seen them and didn’t read them for that reason.
That’s probably because I focussed pretty heavily on books about bookshops and libraries. In 2022 I read 14. In 2023 I read 33! I also found another bookish genre I love – books about writing, recording or publishing books and read 6 of those.
Goal: Find a good balance between books for children and books for grown ups
This is similar to the previous goal, in that I love children’s books and think they have great value no matter your age. But they are usually easier to read and I can find myself sticking with them too much instead of reaching for something more complex and challenging.
In 2023 I read 110 books for adults, 7 for teens/young adults and 33 for children. I’m pleased that I ended up exceeding my original goal of 100 books with adult books alone.
Read more non-fiction
This is one goal I probably achieved, but didn’t exactly smash. Looking back I did do better than last year, though, but not a good as some previous years.
Included in this goal is to specifically read books on feminism and race, and I didn’t do very well on those.
I read 14 non fiction books which isn’t bad at all, I think I just ended up feeling like I hadn’t read many that were particularly thought-provoking.
Four of my non fic reads were memoirs/autobiographies I’ve read before – James Herriot and Roald Dahl, and three were new – Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), Sarah Henshaw and Chris Paling.
My feminist books were A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (she raised many excellent points and was really ahead of her time, but this was a bit of a slog to get through) and Gender Rebels by Anneka Harry (despite the wonderful array of women this featured, and the interesting nuggets of information it contained the zany writing style made this truly awful and I can scarcely believe that I tortured myself by finishing it).
My only book about racial issues was Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. Fantastic topic, but written in a very dull way which meant I found myself unmotivated to keep picking it up.
Other reading stats
Those were all my goals, but since 2020 I’ve noted the number of physical books vs ebooks vs audiobooks that I’ve read. They’re all equally valid ways to read so this is just me liking statistics.
I took out a Kindle Unlimited subscription in April so I was expecting this years ebook total to be quite high – but perhaps not as high as they actually are!
I read 62 physical books, 59 ebooks and 29 audiobooks. If I’d had Kindle Unlimited for the full year I’d no doubt have read more ebooks than physical ones.
I checked and I read 31 books on KU in 8 months, so around 3-4 books a month at a cost of £2.50 a book. Not everything I’d want to read is on KU but there’s a pretty good catalogue and I’ve always found something to read.
A new stat I decided to record this year was how many books I borrowed from the library, which turned out to be 43 books. Of those 9 were actually ebooks, including most of the classics I mentioned earlier.
Library reservations are like buses. You wait for them to come in for ages then three turn up at once.
Which got me to thinking, I wonder how many books of the 150 I read that I actually bought this year. Without spending ages trawling through my past online orders I can’t be totally sure.
Obviously I pay for my Audible and Kindle Unlimited subscriptions so those books are not free – but they sort of feel free as I don’t spend money per title. I pay £69.99 up front for Audible (£5.80 a month) for which I can choose 12 books a year (though I do get a lot of buy-one-get-one-free offers, and there’s a lot of books free in the plus catalogue) and Kindle Unlimited is £9.49 a month. I’ve definitely bought a couple of Audible books on sale (usually £2.99), and I know that I’ve bought 4 Kindle books. I’ve got a couple of Audible books in my library that I haven’t listened to yet, though, and probably Kindle ones too.
I was going to say that I absolutely only bought two physical books (for myself) this year – Silver and Gold and a Nancy Drew, but then I remembered that I bought around 6 or 7 Angel novels. This was quite good of me as there were 12 that I didn’t have. Though it is also possibly quite bad of me as I haven’t read any of them yet. And then there were the two Collin’s Seagull Library titles I also bought but did not read… but does money spent on books you didn’t read even count? I read a few books in 2023 that I bought in 2022 or earlier, so they were pretty much free books. Right?
The Blytons
Blyton was my second most-read author of the year which is kind of surprising. I’ve actually read very few in the five years that I’ve been doing this round up.
2019 – 5
2020 – 5
2021 – 6
2022 – 6
And 2023? 13!
I feel like I’ve been taken back to my childhood a bit, as I read Five Are Together Again early in the year, and then went on to start at the beginning again. I read the first nine Famous Fives to Brodie – the fastest I’ve read them in goodness knows how long.
The other books I read were The Secret Island, Holiday Stories and Silver and Gold.
I really should have counted The Christmas Book and Enid Blyton’s Christmas Stories but I didn’t think to at the time and it’s too late now! If I had, Blyton would be my most-read author as I read 14 Jodi Taylor books.
Blyton-adjacent books I read were:
First Class Murder by Robin Stevens and King’s Ransom by Helen Moss, both authors recommended by me if you like Blyton.
That turned out to be a more thorough examination of last year’s reading than I had intended.
I’ve made more or less the same goals for this year, but I’ve started using a couple of new apps to track my reading (Bookmory and Storygraph) so I’ll hopefully have some new and interesting images and stats to share next year.
Did you set a reading goal for last year, if so, how did you get on? Have you set one for 2024?
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 