2023 Reading Summary

When I rebooted this blog in 2022, I didn’t plan for it to become a book review site. That happened purely because writing up blurbs on books I’d read seemed like an easy way to make sure I kept posting on here. It was accidental, but here we are.

By the numbers

I made 44 posts in 2023. All but one of them was a book review, and that one was about how heavy a book was. So this year’s posts were all books, all the time.

According to the posts, I read (or at least started and then set aside) 43 books in 2023. I can’t remember the last time I read so many different books in a single year. Maybe never.

That total doesn’t include the scifi/fantasy short story magazines I read, since I stopped writing them up in 2022. There were:

• 10 issues of Clarkesworld (I still have the last 2 issues to read)
• 10 issues of Fantasy
• 4 issues of Uncanny
• 5 issues of Magazine of F&SF

27 of the books from 2023 were fiction, naturally making the remaining 16 non-fiction. I’m especially pleased at how much non-fiction I managed to fit in this year.

Looking forward

I have no goals for 2024. I’m not looking to surpass (or even equal) my reading numbers for 2023, for instance. All I really want is to keep up my trend of continuing to read at all. For years I didn’t read much, at least not things that weren’t blog posts or emails or work-related articles. It’s been really lovely to regain my desire to read things, and I don’t wish to lose that.

However—if things work out as I hope they will—I’ll be employed early in 2024. While I rarely spent normal work hours reading in 2023, I can’t pretend that having a job won’t impact how much I read this year. It may. As long as I don’t use my 2023 reading totals to flog myself in 2024, and as long as I keep reading at all, I think whatever reading I’m able to do in the next year will be A-OK.