A review of my reading in 2023 and a look ahead

Social media is currently full of readers telling us their favourite books of 2023, how many books they read in the year and their plans for the year ahead. I certainly don’t want to be any different ! Actually I find it interesting to read about what books have been enjoyed and how people fit their reading into lives which are very often more busy than mine.

In 2023 I read 342 books – most were new to me but some were rereads. This is slightly fewer than the year before but pretty typical of my totals for recent years. I know that it’s more than many people read but you need to remember that I am a retired person and reading, for me, is not just something I do in my spare time but an occupation that I pursue avidly – I probably read for four or five hours on an average day and considerably more on holidays.

Most of the books I read were in paper form. This is because I have been trying to reduce the size of my physical to-be-read pile. Unfortunately, because of my weakness for charity shops and buying books online I may have read 220 physical books in the year but I have bought 288 – that pile is getting no smaller ! I read only 17 books on audio because I no longer commute but I still found them very enjoyable. My Kindle accounts for the rest.

Of the 342 books I read in the year 24% were non-fiction. For years I have been trying to get this figure higher and this is the highest it has ever been – I am aiming for 25% of all the books I read to be factual. The two largest categories of non-fiction I read were history and biographies/memoirs which made up over two thirds of the books. I also read some true crime and some travel, with a very few other books that didn’t fit into any of my categories.

My fiction reading was predominantly crime – in fact, crime novels were 37% of my total reading for the year. Crime covers a spectrum of books including police procedurals, psychological thrillers, political thrillers, cosy crime and suspense novels. The next highest category in fiction is romance followed closely by fantasy/science fiction. Of course, many books cross categories with crime stories including a love element or romance being set in the future. I try and work out what the main theme of the book is for me and assign it to that category. Lots of these books are in series so I tend only to review the first book. I also don’t usually review romance novels because they are often very similar – they are what I read when I am bored, tired or upset and want a novel where I can be very sure of the plot and know that there will be a happy ending.

I abandoned 31 books which I had started so they are not included in these figures. I mainly give up on a book because I am bored, bewildered or I have spotted inaccuracies which I just can’t live with (a recent Regency romance was written by someone who obviously had no idea at all about the differing roles of barristers and solicitors and when they started using the words interchangeably I gave up on them). I usually give a book about 50 pages before I stop reading but given the size of my to-be-read pile I am not reading books I don’t enjoy – there will be a more suitable one in the pile for me.

So, 2023 was a good year for reading. I enjoyed most of the books I read and some of them were very good indeed (see my three best of the year lists here, here and here). I finished my challenge where I read one book from each of the past 60 years (see here for details). I joined in a challenge to read 20 books from my to-be-read pile over the summer and you can see my efforts here. I also bought, opened and shared a bookish Advent calendar in December (see here).

In 2024 I shall keep on reading and reviewing as before. I intend to do another summer challenge and I shall consider an Advent calendar again. I am also going to blog about the books I have read over the past 25 years (see here for an introduction to that). I want to carry on reading a lot of non-fiction and it would be nice to diversify my fiction reading away from so much crime related content. I also aim to stay away from charity shops until I have reduced the pile of unread books considerably.

I am looking forward to it all immensely.

Keep reading …