stats the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it

So here's part 2 of the annual book blogging stats round-up. Part 1 was the barely-there starter, a single quivering cube of beetroot jelly with a dab of blowtorched anchovy foam served on a roof tile; this is the entire haunch of venison with a bucket of gravy that follows.

Highlights to note: number of books read was pretty much the same as the previous three years but average length was down a bit at around 309 pages (longest book of the year was The Lay Of The Land at 726 pages, albeit with a few missing), so overall page count was also down a bit as a result. 2020 and 2021 in particular were bumper years (partly lockdown-related I assume) and 2022-2024 were steady at around 7500 pages in total; 2025 was a bit lower at 6805. Nonetheless once you get back beyond 2020 you have to go back to the honeymoon year of 2011 for a higher overall number.

Overall post count was pretty low at 51, only 2017 and 2022 were lower. As a result book reviews as a percentage of overall posts was the third-highest on record at 43.14%. 2022 remains the only year where that ratio has exceeded 50%.

7 of the 22 books I read in 2025 were by female authors; that percentage (31.82%) is the highest since 2016 and a great improvement on the testosterone-soaked, jism-festooned sausage-fest of 2019 which represents the nadir here at 11.76%.

If you've still got room I can offer you a little palate-refreshing dessert item with your coffee and cigars, again sex-related (no, stop it): Grass was the third female-authored novel in succession, just the fourth time that's happened in the history of this blog and the first since December 2015. As that linked post points out, even two in a row is relatively unusual, and a quick unscientific scan suggests that it's happened a further eleven times since the beginning of 2016. As with all three of the previous threesomes (no, stop it) there will not be a fourth as my current book is by a man. Sorry, ladies.

Grass was also the seventh one-word book title of the year, something I'm pretty confident must be a record (Kudos, Dalva, Jack, We, Trio and Day were the others). This post from late 2024 reckons I'd clocked up 84 in about 18 years at an average of less than five a year. I didn't manage to match the four in a row from early 2018 noted in that post, though.