I don’t like the retrospective posts looking back at the whole year behind. I’ve written before about that and I’ve written at length in the past about my resolution to never make another new year’s resolution (still going strong). New year, new you is fine for some, but making a significant change can happen whenever if needs to.

This year I was interested to see how my reading had bounced back. A couple of years back my reading and creativity had dropped off a cliff. I don’t think I broke double digits in terms of books read, and that’s tragic. Goodreads creates an annual summary that includes number of books read. This supposes one has actually entered all the books read, but I generally try to keep up with that.

I decided to take a look at my overall stats for the past decade. It’s actually a very nice feature of the site. I’m a little bit off my pace of last year, but far outpacing that bad year. Then I started going further back. Turns out I’ve been very hot and cold over the past decade. I don’t know if those years connect with specific things in my life or things going on in the world, but it’s an odd wave pattern. Somehow I thought I was further along in the “many books read” department. I am interested in how this will look going forward.

By the numbers:
Year – Books Read – Approximate page count
2024 – 21 – – 6,700
2023 – 23 – – 9,100
2022 – 9 – – 2,500
2021 – 17 – – 5,300
2020 – 39 – – 12,500 (pretty sure this was Covid Year)
2019 -16 – – 4,600
2018 – 9 – – 3,000
2017 – 26 – – 9,700
2016 – 25 – – 8,700
2015 – 16 – – 6,000
2014 – 24 – – 8,300

This year played out like this:

I’m going to take some time and ponder these numbers. Some of them I think I know what was going on. Some of them are a mystery. Hopefully I’ll have a bounty of books to show for the coming year and I can continue to track these stats.