stats

It’s time for some reading stats! Always such a fun post to put together, and I love reading other people’s – do pop a link in the comments if you’ve done something similar. As usual, I’ll be comparing to last year’s stats – and hopefully you’ve already spotted my 10 favourite books from last year’s reading.

Number of books read
I read 216 books last year, which might be an all-time-high? The next stat will explain why it is so high – a rather surprising 27 books up on the previous year. I know we always say it’s about quality rather than quantity, and I don’t think it was the best year ever for memorable reads, though I did read a good 20 or so that I think are superlative. Any year with at least one wow-this-is-so-good book is a good year.

Number of audiobooks
This is where the numbers ramped up. I listened to 94 audiobooks last year, up from 71 last year. Which means my print total (122) is very similar to my print total the previous year (118). I wonder if this number will go down now, since I have cancelled my Audible subscription – but also have discovered the bounty of BorrowBox and Libby.

Male/female writers
I read 145 books by women, 68 books by men, and three books by men and women. That means it was 67% books by women – I’m always surprised by how consistently I read around two-thirds books by women, since I don’t set any targets or intentions around that. (The previous two years have been 64% and 69% female writers.)

Fiction/Non-fiction
My fiction number barely changed since 2024 – up to 142 from 138. The book jump was in non-fiction – up to 74 from 51. Which means 34% of my reads were non-fiction, whereas it usually hovers around the 25% mark. One of the reasons is because I tend to prefer non-fiction audiobooks (or very plotty fiction), so the audio binge bumped up the number. Usually I read more non-fiction by men, but women won 44 vs 30.

Books in translation
11 books, one up on 2024. They were from Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Polish, Hebrew, and Persian.

Re-reads
Matching 2024’s all-time-high of 18 re-reads. I even read Mrs Dalloway twice in 2025 – both via the exceptional audiobook that I have evangelised about a lot. As always, a lot of rereading was for podcast, British Library Women Writers, or book club, but I did listen to a lot of Jane Austen too.

New-to-me authors
Half of my favourite books from 2025 were by authors I hadn’t read before – and, across the year, 91 books were by new-to-me authors. That’s 42%, extremely similar to the previous year’s 41%. Again, I didn’t set any targets, but I do like the idea of meeting new authors.

Persephones
My ambling-along attempts to read more from my Persephone shelves never seems to actually happen in any significant way. This year, it was just one – Crooked Cross by Sally Carson. (And 75% of another that isn’t very good, but I suspect I’ll finish eventually.)

Most surprisingly good book
I was delighted to fall for two books by authors I’ve read quite a lot of before – Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson and Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane. Hansford Johnson and Keane were both on my list of ‘enjoyable but not exceptional authors’, and these books were both head and shoulders above the others I’ve read by them. I also never expected to enjoy Paul Auster as much as I did.

Most disappointing book
I hadn’t realised that This Little World by Stella Benson was travel writing rather than fiction, and she was so much less fun and quirky than usual. And I had hoped to love Ariel by Sylvia Plath – you’ll have to listen to the Tea or Books? episode on that for our controversial takes on Plath’s poetry.

Best title
There is something about Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay that (accurately) made me sure that I would enjoy it. People To Be Loved by Preston Sprinkle has the bonus of a good title and a truly excellent author name.

Worst title
No Mama No by Verity Bargate is a very good novella about a young mother struggling in the most off-kilter way – but that title makes it sound like those dreadful misery memoirs that cluttered up charity shops in the early 2000s. (The other novella I read by her this year, Tit For Tat, was also very good – but when you realise what the title is referring to, it feels rather too much on the nose.) Honorary mention for Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro, which was my favourite book of the year but has a title that sounds like fridge-magnet philosophy.

Most misleading title
Trial By Terror by Paul Gallico sounded like a schlocky horror novel, but was actually a politically interesting look at journalism, war, integrity and a good dollop of adventure thrown in.

Was this book written for me?
It is lovely to read a book that feels so purposefully created for my tastes. This year, that was Recommended! by Nicola Wilson, about the Book Society. Thankfully it was also done extremely well.

Animals in book titles
I had an all-time-low of only three last year. This year… seven:  Proust and the Squid, Rabbit Foot Bill, The Swan in the Evening, The Snake Has All The Lines, My Good Bright Wolf, The Blind Owl, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A girl tasted emotions, a murder was solved from purgatory, a woman obeyed her diary, people got lost inside a rubbish dump, ex-lovers went back in time, a man restarted his day multiple times to fix his mistakes, children spontaneously combusted, a plague killed all but one woman, an apocalypse killed all but one household, a man levitated in his sleep, a fortune teller fooled herself, a gameshow sent contestants to parallel universes, and Georgiana Darcy travelled through time to solved a murder on the set of Sense and Sensibility.

Happy new year, everyone. As has become an annual tradition for so many of us in the book blogging world, let’s take a look back at 2024 in reading stats! (Hopefully you’ve already spotted my favourite reads of the year.) As ever, I’ll be comparing to my previous year’s stats post – 2023 stats are here.

Number of books read
I read 189 books last year, which is nine up on 2023. Not a massive increase, and 12 fewer than 2022, but it helped that my eyes weren’t too bad throughout the year. I think my days of reading voraciously without thinking about my eyes are over, but an army of eyedrops are making things very doable.

Number of audiobooks
Somehow this continues to increase – I think probably due to Spotify offering their 15 hours of audiobooks per month, which started towards the end of 2023. I listened to 71 audiobooks (compared to 67 in 2023) – meaning I read 118 print books (compared to 113 in 2023).

Male/female writers
It wasn’t until a while after I finished my top 10 list that I realised they were all written by women. And, as ever, women dominated my reading: 118 books by women, 65 by men, and 6 by men and women together or authors whose gender I didn’t know. Having said all that, my 64% female reading is the lowest for a long time – down from 69% last year.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 138 works of fiction and 51 works of non-fiction. It’s a slightly lower ratio of non-fiction, but it seems to usually hover around the 25% mark. After one year of anomaly in 2023, I’m back to my inadvertent trick of reading more non-fiction by men than by women (though only 26 vs 24, and one by a man and a woman).

Books in translation
Matching the total of 2023, with 10 books in translation. They were from Japanese x2, Italian x2, Spanish x2, French x2, Czech and Swedish.

Re-reads
I think this is my biggest year for re-reads ever, at 18 titles (it was 14 in 2023). That includes three books – Passing by Nella Larsen, Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts, and The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning – that I read twice in 2024.

New-to-me authors
I was pleased to see that eight of my top 10 books were by new-to-me authors, but did that represent a trend for the year? Well, 78 of the 189 books were new authors to me, making it 41% – last year it was 38%, so it’s a small increase.

Most disapppointing book
As ever, it’s the books you have the highest hopes for that end up being the most disappointing. I was sad that Mollie Panter-Downes’ At The Pines wasn’t more interesting, and was surprised by how bad I found George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, given his usual reliability. Perhaps the most disappointing, given how long it had been on my shelf and how much I expected to love it, was the dull Spinster by Sylvia Ashton-Warner.

Most surprisingly good book
After having a range of responses to Margaret Kennedy’s novels, from DNF to liking, I was surprised by how much I loved The Oracles. And, for book club, I didn’t expect to find Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang such a fun, thought-provoking page-turner.

Short stories
It feels like a year where I read a lot of short story collections… but, looking back, it was only seven. Isn’t it funny how something can feel like a theme of the year, until you look back. Still, more than usual!

Seeing myself in books
I very seldom read to see myself reflected – much more likely to empathise with a 1930s housewife than with someone like me. But a handful of non-fiction books this year really spoke to my heart – particularly Caroline Crampton’s A Body Made of Glass about health anxiety and How To Be Multiple by Helene de Bres about the philosophy of identical twins.

Authors who died this year
Two authors I love died this year – I read a couple of Lynne Reid Banks’ books after she died, partly in tribute, but when I read Trespasses by Paul Bailey I marvelled that he was still with us – until that was sadly not the case a few months later.

Book by 2024’s Booker winner (but not that book)
After Samantha Harvey’s book appeared on A Good Read, I hastened to the audiobook and found it fascinating – but this was before she won the Booker, and it wasn’t Orbital – it was The Shapeless Unease, her non-fiction work about insomnia.

Animals in book titles
Dear Mrs Bird by A.J. Pearce, The Grasshoppers Come by David Garnett, The XYZ of Cats by Beverley Nichols – and that was it this year. What to make of the drop from 14 to 3? Probably… nothing much.

Shortest Title
A re-read of Day by Michael Cunningham, with Back by Henry Green and 2084 by John Lennox close behind.

Persephones
I always intend to read a lot of them, and I always seem to fail – just two this year, A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam and a re-read of They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple. Well, I suppose Diary of a Provincial Lady is also a Persephone, but I didn’t read the Persephone edition.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A man meets his dead parents, a woman’s doppelganger commits murder, a woman’s doppelganger gets radicalised, two men claim to be Lord Lucan, a duchess disappears, a baron lives entirely in the trees, a couple tell devastating truths in a power cut, a woman follows her shape-shifting lover around the world through clues in periodicals, a violent dystopia takes over Britain, dead people dance on a Scottish island, people believe they are made of glass, a mirror is a portal to the past, a woman on a psychiatric ward travels to the distant future, and a girl cannot leave a Norwich theatre without dying.

Reading people’s favourite books of the year, and their reading stats, is always my favourite period of the book blogging calendar. Here are mine – and here’s the link to the 2022 stats, which I’ll be comparing to quite a lot.

Number of books read
I read 180 books, which is actually 21 fewer than 2022 (though still a big number). I think the drop is because of the issues with my eyes I had earlier in the year, which have returned – albeit thankfully much more mildly – for the final four months of the year, since I had Covid. I’m still able to read but not quite as easily as I’d hope.

Number of audiobooks
Audiobooks don’t need 100%-working eyes, of course! And I managed to listen to 67 last year – meaning I read 113 print books. (In 2022 it was 64, so about the same.)

Male/female writers
I read 124 books by women and 56 by men – making my reading 69% female. In 2022 it was 71%, in 2021 it was 70%. I never set out with goals, but somehow it always ends up around there.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 135 works of fiction and 45 works of non-fiction – meaning my non-fiction reading accounted for just over a quarter of the total. And yet produced my top three favourite books of the year! The big change in 2023 from the previous few years was that I read 30 non-fiction books by women and 15 by men – this has usually ended up being the category where men outpaced women.

Books in translation
A slight drop on 2022 (13) and 2021 (11) at ten books. They were translated from Polish x2, Japanese x2, Dutch, French, Italian, Hebrew, Russian and Marathi.

Re-reads
I re-read 14 books in 2023 – and that includes three Mary Lawson novels and five books by Alice Oseman. As usual, re-reading was mostly for podcast or book club. But I did re-read Miss Hargreaves (on audiobook) for the first time in years, and that was a delight.

New-to-me authors
This was a category I could tell was quite low throughout the year. It hasn’t been the easiest year, and I definitely wanted the dependability of authors I trusted (though, interestingly, not enough to re-read!) So 69 of my 180 books were by new-to-me authors. In the past it’s been nearer 50%.

Most disappointing book
It’s always the ones you think you’ll love, isn’t it? I was disappointed to find South Riding by Winifred Holtby so formless and tedious, after years of anticipating enjoying it. And while I didn’t dislike it so much, I wanted The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence to be much better than it was, after loving A Jest of God so much.

Animals in book titles
Mostly birds and cats this year. The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge, A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence, Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit, If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura, The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Notsukawa, The ABC of Cats by Beverley Nichols, A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye, Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse, Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile, Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes, Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, Cuckoo in June by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford,  Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale and, if it counts, The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish.

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve kept an eye on this. In the past couple of years it’s been 18 and 35. In 2023, it was 16. That’s an awful lot of books without names in the title, isn’t it?

Favourite title
I loved Divorce? Of Course by Mary Essex, which was also a fun, if entirely predictable, novel.

Most shocking title
Of course, Jeanette McCurdy’s title I’m Glad My Mom Died is meant to be shocking – and it is quite the attention-grabber. Especially since it’s non-fiction.

Title that fooled a friend
My friend Naomi was keen to read The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt when she saw me reading it, until she realised it was not actually about wool.

Books by people I know
Four in 2023! My friends Tom Carlisle and Noreen Masud – and both my parents! Five if you count Sarra Manning (which I do, really) as she is an online friend I’ve not actually met.

Persephones
I’m always keen to read more of my Persephone backlog. In 2023, I read… none. Oh dear!

Strange things that happened in books this year

A virgin gives birth, a portrait narrates a novel, a house conceals an evil void, a solider travels through time, coffee-drinkers travel through time, time speeds up while listening to records, a census-taker disappears, League of Nations members disappear, members of a family are steadily bumped off, a made-up octogenarian comes to life, cats guard a magical library, someone considering suicide is transported to a magical library, someone considering suicide messages all the contacts in their phone, a phone call tells you it’s your day to die, form-fillers predict the future, cats disappear from the world, and a man meets his ideal woman on a dream bus made of bamboo and rice paper.

I always enjoy reading other people’s reading stats, and I’m coming out of my hiatus to put mine out. I also managed to read for a bit today, which was wonderful, and gives me a bit of hope for the progression of the treatment for my eyes. Thank you for prayers, especially, and for kind thoughts too.

Over to the stats – some, as always, more idiosyncratic than others.

Number of books read
I read 203 books this year, which I find quite hard to believe. In 2021 I read 182, and that was comfortably the most I’d read in a year – so in 2022 I did even more. In reality, I’ve read a similar number of paper books as I have done for the past few years, but got EVEN more into audiobooks than last year.

Male/female writers
145 of those books were written by women, and 58 by men – so just over 71% of the books I read were by women. It was 70% in 2021, and it’s interesting how similar the percentage always is, without me making any goals or aims about gender in my reading. Of course, some of it is reading for British Library Women Writers – but I’ve read more women than men every year that I’ve recorded.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 145 works of fiction (98 by women) and 58 works of non-fiction (22 by women). I usually read about a third non-fiction, but this was only 28.6%. I’ve never quite worked out why I read more fiction by women and more non-fiction by men.

Books in translation

In 2021, I read 11 books in translation and that was my all-time high – and I bettered it in 2022! I read 13 books in translation – from Flemish, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Portuguese and Slovakian.

Re-reads
I re-read 16 books in 2022 and, as usual, they were almost all for podcast, book group, or British Library Women Writers. The exception was that I re-read all the Heartstopper graphic novel series when the Netflix series came out.

Number of audiobooks
I listened to eight audiobooks in 2020, and thought I’d really gone up in the world with 21 in 2021. Ha! In 2022 I listened to 64 audiobooks. SIXTY-FOUR! They really took over my life, didn’t they?

New-to-me authors
My aim for 2022 was to read more new-to-me authors, and I even dedicated August to only reading new-to-me authors. So how did I do? I ended up reading 93 new-to-me authors, really bolstered by that month, so it wasn’t quite half – but it wasn’t far off.

Most disappointing book
I think the most disappointing books are always the ones by authors that you’ve previously loved. And that’s why Beside the Pearly Waters by Stella Gibbons and The Girl From the Candle-Lit Bath by Dodie Smith are probably top of this list. Both of these books were dreadful, largely because the authors tried to cover topics far outside their area of expertise – and which they were very incapable of doing well. And then there was Anne of Avonlea – which I was nervous about saying was disappointing, but most of you agreed. Oh and I hated The Sound and the Fury but I also quite expected to.

Reading pairing that really amused me
Nobody found the fact that I read Heatwave by Penelope Lively and Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell sequentially during a heatwave anywhere NEAR as amusing as I did, but I was so proud of myself. (Both very good books, incidentally.)

Author whose name sounded most like a bad pseudonym for a famous country-pop singer
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

Best title
I love a successful punning title, and Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse was a lovely play on words – that also, as a bonus, tells you a lot about the premise of the novel. I read a few Wodehouse novels this year, both print and audio, and it was as delightful as ever.

Worst title
Two Thousand Million Man-Power is an unforgivably bad title for G.E. Trevelyan’s brilliant novel.

Most confusing title
I thought Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff was science-fiction before I started reading it… and discovered it was his childhood memoir.

Most confusing title (if, like me, you’ve never heard of the things in it)
Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm makes much more sense as a title if you know who Iphigenia was or where Forest Hills is – which I do now.

Shortest title
Also the shortest title I’ve ever read – D by Michel Faber.

Title which is the same as a Spice Girls song
Too Much by Tom Allen

Persephones
I’m always trying to read more Persephones, and usually not doing very well with it. In 2022, I read… Because of the Lockwoods and They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple, William – an Englishman (re-read) by Cicely Hamilton, Every Eye by Isobel English and Heat Lightning by Helen Hull. I’ll slowly get through all the unread Persephones!

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve been intrigued to see how often names turn up in book titles if I’m not deliberately seeking them out. In 2021, it was 35. In 2022, it was only 18. WHAT can we interpret from this? Arguably nothing.

Animals in book titles
The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner, The Dogs Do Bark by Barbara Willard, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, Escaping the Rabbit Hole by Mick West, The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Raining Cats and Donkeys by Doreen Tovey, Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman, Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes and I guess, at a push, we can count Julian Barnes’ quite bad book Elizabeth Finch.

Numbers in book titles
Three Things You Need To Know About Rockets by Jessica A. Fox, Four Gardens by Margery Sharp, Five Windows by D.E. Stevenson, Eight Deaths (and Life After Them) by Mark Watson, The Twelve Days of Christmas by Venetia Murray, Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton, Fifty Forgotten Books by R.B. Russell, The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, Two Thousand Million Man-Power by G.E. Trevelyan

Strange things that happened in books this year

A man emerges from 152-year coma, a woman travels back in time to her university days, a girl dies every day in a time loop, a medieval saint comes back to life, a gunman demands a story, a goldfish grants wishes, a zip unveils a hidden person inside someone else, a man is trapped in endless flooding halls of statues, a man fakes blindness, a robot becomes a household friend, a gentleman falls overboard, a man dodges pagan sacrifice, a cliff collapses and kills a group of tourists, Kings of England are selected by random ballot, a man falls in love with a doll, a cow is smuggled off a Channel Island, a door connects two continents, a sabotaged car kills someone, the letter ‘d’ disappears, and an angel charms a bishop’s wife.