I had noticed a pattern in my reading over the last several years. I alternated between reading 180 and 220 books. I didn’t try to get those numbers. That’s just what happened. I’m not sure why there was a 40 book difference each year. I didn’t know why it was never in the middle. And then this year happened…
In 2022 I read 202 books! I’m middle of the road!
Again, no idea why or how. I don’t keep track of how many books I’ve read in total for the year so it is a surprise at the end of the year when Goodreads tells me.
So what did I read in 2022?
It was mostly fiction.
- Urban fantasy was my most read genre with 62 books.
- After that, contemporary romance and historical fantasy tied with 24 books each.
- I pushed to read more scifi and I ended up with 18 books read.
- I consider myself to be major historical romance reader but I only read 12 last year and that was the same as the number of contemporary YA books I read. Some of those historical fantasy books had a lot of romance in them so maybe that’s why that number was down.
What about nonfiction?
- Memoirs were the biggest single genre with 10.
- I read 8 cookbooks and then there were 10 others of all types of genres.
What about the authors I read?
Like most years, most were women by far.
- There were 54 unique white women.
- After that, it drops off a lot, 8 unique Black women, 5 Latina, 8 South Asian, 5 East Asian, 1 Indigenous, and 2 Jewish. Not so good this year. I think I slacked off on monitoring this and it shows.
I did read some male authors.
- There were 25 unique white male authors.
- Then it gets just as bad – 2 Indigenous, 2 Black, 1 East Asian, and 2 South Asian
I did also read books by 1 intersex, 1 nonbinary, and 2 trans authors that I know of.
I don’t have any specific goals for number of books to read for 2023 but I do need to be more conscious of getting more variety of authors in my reading. I like getting more viewpoints.
I would love to read over 200 books! I think my highest ever was 175 and that was when I was a teenager.
I like how you organized your stats. I didn’t pay much attention to diverse authors this year although my percentage is like 50% but I read very little and a lot of that was manga. I think just adding more diverse books to your tbr shelf helps because you already have a number of them you are already interested in and can get reminded of.
Hope you have another great reading year!
I agree that finding a variety of authors makes our reading more interesting. Have a great reading year!