My 2023 Book Report + 2024 Update

I’m back, for real this time, most likely.

It’s been a while since I’ve shown up in your inbox. I made a false return at the end of the summer hoping that pregnancy would finally agree with my prior reading habits, but alas, it was false hope.

If you recall from previous posts, I spent April – December of 2023 pregnant with twins and an unfortunate side effect for me was hating to read. I eventually succumbed to the fact that my reading habit would be put on hold and in its place I played thousands of games of solitaire on my phone.

But I’m back into reading again and actually enjoying it! I’m hoping I can get this newsletter back to its twice a week glory, but we’ll see how it goes with my twin babies and starting back at work next week.

To get started since my reading fell off a cliff last spring, I’m going to share my annual book report for 2023 since I clearly didn’t share it in January as usual. Remember you can always view a spreadsheet of my reading library here, and view the yearly stats on the various sheets.

Books Read

After hitting a reading record of 72 books in 2022, I followed it up with a measly 28 books in 2023. But again, I read for less than half of the year, so it is what it is. I’m setting a reasonable goal of ~40 books for 2024 as it’s hard to anticipate what this first year of parenting twins will bring, but for now they are great sleepers and I have time in the evening to read.

You can see where pregnancy began in April, and that I quickly succumbed to first trimester illness. The couple books I did read throughout the year were parenting books, as they were the only ones that managed to capture the small amount of attention my brain mustered up.

How I Read

In 2022 a quarter of the books I read were audio format. This year, even that wasn’t enough to get me to ‘read’. What I did read was mostly physical copies, with only a handful of audio books.

What I Read About

In 2022 I surprised myself with History being my number one genre. In 2023, however, I got back to my Social and Behavioral Science roots, with a healthy dose of Memoir and Biographies. Interestingly, the History category that was so prominent in the prior year, is absent in 2023, except for History of Science, which I track as a separate specific category.

Hoping to make 2024 a great year of reading. Thanks for being here :)