Reading Stats 2023

For the past two years, I have shared my reading stats.  Maybe it makes me a little nerdy - but I'm not.  I'm very nerdy, and I like statistics.  So here we go for 2023. 

I read a total of 52 books in 2023.  This compares to 56 books in 2021 and 35 in 2022.  In 2021, I was preparing to teach a CLM course.  I'm not sure why this year is higher than last year, but yippee.

Here are how the stats worked out:

Question 1: What was the format of the book?  Hard copy? Kindle? Audiobook?  Audiobook is the winner, at 71%.  I read a lot as I drive to work, using audiobooks, so this is not surprising.  It's down from last year (91%); books I read for classes are usually kindle or paperbacks.  

Question 2: Had I read the book before?  This year, to make sure I didn't get in a rut of only re-reading books, I set a goal of at least 30% new books.  This was not hard to achieve.  69% were new books to me.  This is up from 57% in 2023 and a 50/50 split in 2021.

Question 3: What was the genre of the books I read?    The winner this year was mystery, at 32%.  Last year's  "winner" was fantasy.  Another one of my goals for 2023 was to read at least 4 "spiritual development" books.  I read 14; that category came in at 27% .

Question 4: When were the books published?  50 percent of the books I read were published between 2020 and 2023; the rest were spread out between 2019 and 1975.   I'm re-reading the Elizabeth Peters books which were published beginning in 1975.  The second largest category was 1990-1999, at 17%.  

Question 5: This is a new one.  I gave each book a star rating of 1-5.  I gave each star rating a definition (which is too much stuff to share in this post) - fiction and non-fiction had different rating definitions.  My average rating was 4.1, which the median and mode at 4.0.  My lowest rating was 2.5, and the highest was 5.  

This is my Goodreads profile if you are interested in seeing what I've read.  This page is my Blog Library.  I list faith books here (or other books I've blogged about) with links to the posts.