A couple of these arrived today, and I almost didn’t include them in the picture until I realized I had two books called “Gilgamesh” (one a new translation of the epic, the other a historical fiction) and two featuring the rather improbable combination of the words “blood” and “promise” in their titles.
Call this the Brandon Sanderson edition if you like; this is what happens when you spend the whole month reading books that weren’t on your TBR shelf while all your Christmas books pile up.
According to Goodreads, I read 185 books in 2024, comprising a grand total of 81,191 pages, or 221.83 pages per day. That’s assuming I finish Katherine Addison’s The Grief of Stones tonight, which I’m going to, because I have to start reading The Way of Kings tomorrow and I want to be halfway through that big bastard by the end of the day.
(It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow and we will have family in town. That’s not gonna happen. I’m going to shoot for it regardless.)
With the exception of video games, I went full hermit this year, abandoning nearly all of my hobbies or media consumption except for reading. I have read for half an hour before going to bed at the end of the night for my entire life, and I think I stretched that to an hour this year, and I started reading with my morning coffee on Saturday and Sundays, meaning that my “morning coffee” would regularly last from whenever I got up to lunchtime. So yes, I read a lot faster than most people, but I also spend a whole damn lot of time with a book in my hand. Estimating an eleven-hour-a-week minimum would not be unreasonable at all, and I strongly suspect if I were to ever calculate any such thing it would be more than that.
My average book, by the way, was 439 pages. I actually did hit 200 books one year because I decided to; this year I genuinely wasn’t aiming at any particular number. I bet I could have done 250 if I had selected for shorter books, but I didn’t want to. Only 13 of those 185 books were nonfiction, which is shockingly low even knowing how hard I focused on series fiction this year– I’m shooting for 20% of my books next year being nonfiction, if you didn’t see the update to my reading goals in my previous post.
I read books by 124 authors this year, of which 86 were new to me, which is surprisingly high, especially once we get to how many books by each author I read. Without even looking, I’ll tell you right now that the author I read the most books by is Adrian Tchaikovsky, totaling …
… (looks at Goodreads list) …
Jesus, ten books. Other authors showing up more than once:
Six books: Pierce Brown
Five books: J.R.R. Tolkien, James Tynion IV
Four books: John Gwynne, TJ Klune
Three books: Thiago Abdalla, R.J. Barker, David Dalglish, J.S. Dewes, Robin Hobb, Jay Kristoff, Josh Malerman, Andrea Stewart, Richard Swan
Two books: Susan Abulhawa, Josiah Bancroft, Carissa Broadbent, Shannon Chakraborty, Rin Chupeco, Piper CJ, Rachel Gillig, John Keay, Judy Lin, Vaishnavi Patel, Ava Reid, Samantha Shannon, M.L. Wang
I thought about doing a gender breakdown, but it broke my brain. I have a bunch of authors with initials for first names, and a lot of the time I don’t immediately know those folks’ gender, and then you throw in the enbies and that’s more research than I really want to do. I’m about to show you the whole list anyway, so you can look for yourself if you want. :-). Of the 29 authors I read more than one book by, I’m certain 14 are men and 13 are women and yes, I know that doesn’t add up to 29 and I still might be wrong on a couple of them. For whatever that might be worth.
Pretty covers time? Pretty covers time. Click on ’em for gallery view:
On one hand, this is the smallest my TBR shelf has been since July. On the other hand, the Christmas Books haven’t hit it yet, and my January reading is not going to subtract a single book off of this shelf since all of my Stormlight books are already shelved in the living room. Am I doomed? Yes, I’m doomed.
Also, I’m amending my reading goals: see that stack on the left? It’s entirely nonfiction. That’s half the year’s goal right there. So instead of 25 specific books, it’s now 20% of all of my reading is going to be nonfiction. The math/teaching goal is going to stay the same, and I think The Anxious Generation is going to count toward that goal even though it’s not explicitly about teaching.
Expect several posts today, by which I mean “at least two.”
I was hoping to get to the stats nerdery post today, but I took a nap this afternoon with a cat on my chest, so it’s just going to be this. 2024 was one of the heaviest reading years of my life, and it was a year with no particular reading goal beyond “whatever I want” and “clear my TBR shelf,” which not only never happened, it never came close to happening. I want next year to have a little bit more focus, and I’m going to throw one ridiculous challenge at myself in January just for the sheer hell of it.
Reading Goal the First: In January 2025, I will read all five of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives books, plus the two supplemental novellas. That is, according to Wikipedia, 6,335 pages. I have read the first two books and part of the third. My guess is that if I can get through Oathbringer this time without the issues I had the last time I picked it up, I’ll be fine; 204 pages a day during a month where I have one three-day weekend and don’t have work until the 6th is not even a particularly demanding pace. That said, shit happens. We’ll see if I can pull this off.
Reading Goal the Second: Setting a number of books goal is almost meaningless at this point, but let’s go with 100 again. Most years I don’t have to push too much to hit that number, and unless I rediscover some other hobbies I’ll blow it away again, but I don’t want to set it so high that I start adjusting what I’m reading to hit a number. That said …
Reading Goal the Third: At least 22 nonfiction books over the course of the year. Why 22? That’s two a month if you ignore January. I may adjust this after I look a little bit more closely at what I read in 2024; I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that many nonfiction books this year and I want to up the number somewhat.
Reading Goal the Fourth: At least six of those 22 books must be about teaching and, ideally, teaching math. I joined the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics this year and one of the benefits of that membership is deep discounts on their professional library, which is good; that said, these books tend to be hellaciously dry so I’m not going to commit to too much. Six is one every other month. That’s not bad at all.
Oh, and one more thing: Starting with January 1st, I’m going to start looking into moving away from housing everything at Goodreads. I’m going to start simultaneously recording my reading on Goodreads, Storygraph and Bookly, and we’ll see which app wins out. Right now Storygraph looks pretty cool because it appeals to the numbers nerd in me and there appear to be a thousand ways to generate charts and spreadsheets and such from your reading, and really, if you can’t make a spreadsheet out of something, is it even worth doing? I’ll report back on this as I get into what the different apps can do.
That’s what I’ve got for right now. Do you have any plans for your reading next year?
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