Reading stats for 2022 — Blog

I see this recap as a way to be at least a little more conscious of how and what I’m reading. (Some things are easier to see in the aggregate.) Also cf. last year’s stats.

In 2022 I read an even 100 books, a number I achieved largely because I stacked the end with novellas. I have no shame. There were also 37 books I decided not to finish. (Those abandoned books are, however, included in the count of 36,440 pages that I read, to provide a slightly more accurate picture.)

Of the 100 that endured to the end:

55% were fiction and 45% were nonfiction
Of the fiction, and acknowledging that genre boundaries aren’t always clear cut, the genres were: 53% fantasy (29 books), 35% science fiction (19), 7% horror (4), 4% classics (2), and 1% general fiction (1)
39% of the 100 had at least one female author, 61% did not
14% were written before 2010 (9% were before 2000 and 4% before 1900)
A whopping 54% were written in the last three years (18 from 2020, 19 from 2021, 17 from 2022)
The earliest book I read in 2022 was written around A.D. 731 (go Bede), roughly thirteen hundred years earlier

After looking at this, I’ve got a microresolution to get myself to read more old books this new year, so that I’m not skewing quite so much toward the hyper-recent.