Another Year in Reading

I read 100 Books in 2023!!!

Friends!

How are you? How were your holidays? Mine were relaxing and not very productive—which was the whole point. I did hustle a little to reach my 2023 reading goal, and reader, I made it. I wanted to read 100 books and tbh it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be! Yes, I do count basically everything but picture books in this list, including manuscripts, audiobooks, graphic novels, middle grade. I get some eyerolls (from cough—my husband—cough) that [whatever] book shouldn’t count and to that I say: ppppbbbbbbbbbttt. It’s my list and I can count what I want. You can, too.

Without further ado, let’s look at some charts!

Isn’t that just pretty? Sigh. I love looking at it. I’m going to print it out and stick it on the wall. I may try to match it this year, but I don’t feel the need to beat it. 100 is so many! I’m going to finish two books this week so I’m already off to a good start.

Well, lol, obviously I ready a bunch in November and December in a rush to meet my goal. But I was also reading a lot of client manuscripts and full requests from my queries. February is usually a dip because it’s a short month but also February just sucks and I’m more focused on getting through the winter. I’ll have to plan some fun reads for this year to beat the slump. September and October are the busiest months both workwise and socially so that makes sense, too.

In previous years I’ve done this graph as a pie chart, but there were too many entries this time and you couldn’t read them all! Success! I always aim to read broadly, without making anything feel like an obligation, and I’m happy with how this turned out. As usual, my go-tos are Graphic Novels (the quickest to read) and Historical Fiction (which I very often do in audiobook), so it’s not hard to rack those up. They’re also my favorite genres! I’m happy I read more Romance and Literary Fiction, too. More of that in 2024!

This year I read way more hardcovers and paperbacks and fewer audiobooks and manuscripts, as a percentage of the whole, so don’t worry, I’m still reading manuscripts. When I read something “hybrid,” I read a portion of a book in ebook and audiobook, usually because I had to finish it quickly for my book club, lol.

Well, apparently it was usually a book not an unpublished manuscript! As it should be. I can’t only read for work. That’s a fast track to burnout.

For adults! I still like YA and MG, but I’ve just been more drawn to adult books in recent years

And this year I read way more books that I actually bought! And read basically the same number of books I bought myself as I got from the library. This year I count full books I read on submission but that didn’t end up becoming a client. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Why not. My goal for 2024 is to read the books I already bought (but not necessarily to buy fewer books!). 24 books from my shelves in ‘24!

This is what a healthy book market looks like, friends. Buying a little bit from a lot of places so that the most places have the chance to stay in business! Yes, I do buy from Amazon, usually ebooks. And I do most of my preordering from Bookshop.org.

I’m running out of space (in the email version) so I’ll end here with a list of most of the books I read, minus some clients ones you can’t know about yet. If you want to shop for any of these, I put them all right here!

Read more in 2024, friends. Everyone wins.

XOXOOXX,

Kate