stats

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.