reading, blogging and arithmetic

It's early January, so as well as reflecting on your New Year's resolutions, and how soon you can get away with discreetly abandoning them, it's time for the 2023 blog stats round-up, and some deep stattery relating to my book-reading habits in particular. 

One thing that I've been troubled by in recent years is that while the book-related posts are pretty much a given, as I have a pretty strict regime of doing a post-read review on every fiction book I read, the non-book-related posts have taken a dive lately. 2024 wasn't exactly a bonanza year for that stuff but did at least feature 36 non-book-related posts (weeeeell, strictly, 36 posts that weren't specifically reviews of a book I'd just read; some of them were almost certainly book-related) alongside the 23 book reviews. The book posts therefore comprised around 39% of the total, less than 2021 or 2022 and arresting an inexorable rise over the lifetime of this blog.

Focusing on the book stuff specifically, 2023 was almost exactly identical to 2022 - exactly the same number (23) of books read and a page count only 31 pages different. Longest book was The Overstory at 625 pages and shortest was its immediate successor The Ice Palace at 139. The average book length of 324 pages is actually quite high by historical standards; the only years with higher numbers were 2015, 2021 and the absurd statistical outlier, 2020, which I apparently spent reading a series of colossal doorstops. I guess never leaving the house that year freed me from the constraint of having to be able to physically carry my current book. 

Where was I? Oh yes, SEX. Sex sex sex. Well, it was only a furious last-minute thrust wherein three of the last four books were by female authors that brought 2023 to a thunderous climax and thereby up to parity with 2022, with six out of 23 books by women. At 26% that ratio just scrapes over the overall historical average of just under 25%.

Anyway, here's the usual set of graphs. 

Finally, this Washington Post article from this week contains the chart reproduced below which tells you where your book-reading habits put you among the general population. To be clear, this will be a sample cohort comprising American people, and I might make the assumption that Brits read more books on average, but I actually have no reason to think that's true. Anyway, my 23 books puts me between the 88th and 92nd percentile. And yes, the implication of the top line on the chart is that 46% of people completed zero books during the year.