Here’s my year in books –
I read 119 books in total (up from 105 last year). According to Goodreads, that’s 36,039 pages. The longest was 11/22/63 by Stephen King at 849 pages, and the shortest was My Brother Jaz by Gideon Haigh at 88 pages. My average rating is 3.03 (clearly I’m mean with stars!).
Of those I read, 86 were by female authors, 32 by male authors and one not specified.
Thirty books were by Australian authors (24 female authors and 6 male authors) and the rest were from New Zealand, America, England, Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, The Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Iran, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Syria and Palestine.
I read 66 books from authors who were new to me in 2024.
Of the 119 books I read, 31 were published in 2024 and the oldest was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, first published in 1937.
Roughly a quarter of my reading (36 books) was non-fiction (23 of which were memoirs).
My reading format was a little different this year, with more hardbacks than previous years (42 this year, compared to 27 last year), mainly because I have borrowed more from the library. My library has introduced a ‘most wanted’ shelf – all latest releases that you can only borrow for a week. I can’t resist this shelf! Of the remainder, I listened to 27 audios and the read 50 e-books.
I read mostly contemporary literature and memoirs, plus essay collections, short stories, historical fiction, biography, pop-psychology, and few suspense and dystopian novels.
Tomorrow I’ll post my favourites for 2024.
Wow! I love the way you do this as a graphic, if I knew how to do that too I’d be tempted to print it out on A3 and have each year framed in my library!
It’s not hard – I just take screen grabs of my Goodreads annual challenge list and then put them together. I do it each year to prompt my memory – sometimes when I’m trying to recall a book, I can remember the cover but not the title or author, so a quick look at these graphics helps me.
Ah. It’s the putting together part that’s a problem. I used to have a terrific program on my old computer, but the photo editing program I have now is hopeless, it doesn’t even do resizing.
I use two free software programs for images – FastStone Image Viewer (it makes resizing and cropping really easy, allows you to add borders etc) and IrfanView 64 (which has a ‘simple panorama’ feature that allows you to join images. It does other stuff too, but I generally use FastStone first).
I tried IrfanView after The Offspring installed it on my computer but I couldn’t figure it out. But I’ve downloaded FastStone and had an initial play with it and it seems quite good, thanks!
I only use IrfanView for joining images together. If it’s any help, in the main tabs got to IMAGE and then choose MERGE IMAGES (SIMPLE PANORAMA IMAGE). From there, you add as many images as you want to join together (either horizontal or vertical). When you’ve added all the images, choose CREATE IMAGE and voila! Hope that works for you.
I’ll have a try. But not today. We are having A Big Birthday here this weekend and I have been cooking up a storm. BTW I have discovered with a trial batch that we had for breakfast this morning that you can cook Spanakopita in an air fryer, yesss!
And then *sigh* the cleaner cancelled late yesterday afternoon.
#Understatement I am a bit tired, and am now going to veg out in front of some silly movie on SBS…
Hope the party goes well!
We are in negotiations about adjourning it indoors because of the weather. Reluctance comes from he who has spent much time prettifying the garden…
I’m glad your library has been coming through for you! We have a “Bestsellers” collection of books that can be borrowed for two weeks with no renewals.
Can’t reborrow ours either and you only have them for a week – I check out the shelf on the morning of my day off work, so that I know I can sit down and read if there’s something particularly tempting!
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice! I’ll also be posting about my favorite books of 2024 tomorrow.
Great number Kate, I didn’t break 100 this year for the first time in ages…
Suspect Novella November gave me a decent boost this year because I didn’t feel like I read more than usual.
Thank you for this thorough statistics of your reading in 2024. Seems like you really read from a varied number of authors, as regards genre, as well as nationalities. Well done.
I think I’m a bit lightweight in terms of genre – it’s usually reading challenges or reading the Stella Prize longlist that gets me out of my go-to genres (contemporary fiction and memoir).
Ooh that shelf in the library sounds terribly tempting. What a good idea of theirs!
Great job!
I love all the different ways statistics are done. Mine are here:
https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2025/01/statistics-2024.html