Every year since 2014, I’ve tried to do an audit of my reading, as well as a list of my favorite books of the year. It’s my way of keeping myself accountable,
2023 Overview
I read 187 books in 2023. I reviewed 39 of them, rated 39 of them 9 or above (not the same ones I reviewed, though!), 91 of them 8. I listened to 13 books with the one teen who will still has regular car time with me.
This is my third year splitting out the digital library loans (Libby and hoopla) from the physical books. My total library reading including those was 88.8%, up 9% from last year. I accepted a lot fewer review copies this year – apologies to the many authors whose offers I turned down due to feeling overwhelmed. The big change from last year is audiobooks, which jumped up from 24% to 33%. Ebook reading also made a slight gain.
What I Read
I read even more fantasy than usual last year! It’s probably because I did the Cybils summer reading group.This is nearly the same as last year. Once again, I didn’t track my picture book reading.
The Authors
Hey, a 1% increase in reading by authors of color, two years in a row! My reading of Native and Middle Eastern authors was finally large enough for Google sheets to give them labels. Just for comparison, since most of you only know about the books I share here. Just for fun, a map of where the authors are from – 14 different countriesA slight increase in reading of books by both female and nonbinary authors. The tiny unlabeled slices are multi-gender author partnerships.
The Characters
White characters are down to 38% of my reading from 43% in 2022, if still higher than my all-time low of 34% in 2020.I tried yet another way of tracking other character diversity this year, with mixed results. I counted religion if the MCs practiced any religion besides Christianity, Economic if they were low income, Ability for both physical disabilities and non-neurotypical characters. I’ll note that there are a lot of people struggling to make ends meet in fantasy books.
I’ve been doing these graphs for ten whole years now – here they are from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. I think I should do some sort of retrospective! As always, if you know of any middle grade or teen books, especially fantasy books, that would help me round out the diversity of my reading, please let me know! And if you have thoughts on these stats or other things you’d like to see, let me know in the comments.
I am sometimes surprised when I look at folks year end wrap ups and see how few books came from the library – so love to see you’re a fellow heavy library user! I think my book source pie chart would look similar to yours.
alibrarymama 
I am sometimes surprised when I look at folks year end wrap ups and see how few books came from the library – so love to see you’re a fellow heavy library user! I think my book source pie chart would look similar to yours.
It’s odd to me, too, when heavy readers don’t use the library – especially when they’re library workers.
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