With the year end upon us, I have the opportunity to look at my stats for the year (I keep track of my reading in a spreadsheet as well as on Goodreads, since it is all on audio I can calculate the time I read per month or per year).

I am finishing book 144 tonight, so 12 books per month exactly.

As for times, well in 2021 I averaged 5 hours and 29 minutes per day and I don't think I will ever be able to top that. This year I came in second place at 5 hours 14 minutes a day. When I started my spreadsheet in 2011 I was averaging 56 minutes a day so I have improved, or basically quit watching television and replaced my free time and workout time with audiobooks (and the e-book or print companion when I am not walking around exercising). YA books are great for exercising because they are uncomplicated by too many characters and do not have twisty, complex plots--for those types of adult books I have to sit down and immersion read. At some times I have two books going because one will be an easier read for workouts.

I found a great audiobook app for Android, and I bought a cheap Tracfone / Android device at Amazon dedicated for that which fits in a pocket. I simply never activated the phone part. I use the Android tablet part with a micro-SD card for storage. It also runs the Audible app, and Libby and Hoopla apps for public library audiobooks. Great little tablet, replaced my old iPod. It was cheap, long battery life, and plays over wireless Bluetooth headphones. When it gets too old hopefully I will be able to replace it with another that has a more current Android version. I'm not online very often with it, just to download the audiobooks from the library.

I hope you met your reading goals for the year. I set my goal at 110 early in the year and beat that a long time ago.

Happy reading.

@Catfish_Fan - that's quite a lot of reading. Well done!

I surpassed my good reads goal of 24 books( still read real books, and work full time). 2 books a month is generally a goal I can meet. So I upped my good read challenge to 28 for 2024. Final total for 2023 was 31 - I've only done that once before in 2016. Time will tell if I am able to meet my new 2 1/3 books a month goal. But 2024 is a leap year so I have an extra day -LOL.

Happy New Year and Happy Reading all!

Most people read exactly 0 books in a year, so any reading goal is great!

FitMary202 wrote: »

Catfish_Fan wrote: »

Most people read exactly 0 books in a year, so any reading goal is great!

What DO they do with their time???

I have a friend who puts quite a bit more time into his television viewing than I do into reading, but I convinced him to add audiobooks to his 45 minute commute and he's doing great with it.

Myself, I used to go fishing (for catfish!), and listen to Detroit Tigers baseball games with my late Grandmother in the spring and summer months. Later I discovered that audiobooks on CD from the library could help me retain what I read and my reading hobby grew from there. I still enjoy fishing and Tigers baseball, and my library checkouts are all digital now.

I saw this game and thought to share it with this group:



It could be fun to play

I'm hyperlexic, autistic, and reading is my stim. So I read way more than the average person. Like, in 23, my Kindle says I read 872 titles. That doesn't count books I read on my computer, or paper books I read. So I'm probably somewhere close to a thousand, allowing for that.

Yeah, I know, I'm a freak, lol. It helps that the average mystery or romance novel takes me about 30 minutes to read. Chewier stuff like hard science is more like two hours. Most short scientific papers take me about 20 minutes if I'm familiar with the field and if I'm not taking notes or getting sidetracked looking up people and locales on Wikipedia. (grin) Perils of reading on a tablet. I'd estimate I read five or six most days. Like tonight, after dinner I read two Age of Sail books again while Husband watched football, then found that an author I like has another series, so I read the first book of that, and then I'm going to have a bath and read the second book and probably the third book, cause hot baths are really nice right now (it's, like, -5 outside and the heat is only managing to keep the house at 62.)

Some of that is rereading because some books or series are comfort food for me and you know, sometimes you just want something comfortable and fun where you know how it ends. Right now that's a couple of Age of Sail sagas. And I'm rereading the papers presented at a symposium in '21 on hadrosaurs, cause I find taxonomic arguments relaxing right before bed.

It's always interesting to see how many I read a year, which is why the kindle app is fun. It keeps count for me.

My claim that most Americans read 0 books per year is pretty accurate.

According to the Washington Post:
The data on most books read comes from our friend David Montgomery, “the spork pollster” who released the results of a new Economist/YouGov poll about America’s reading habits not long after we published last month’s column about America’s biggest readers. Though the Department of Data was supposed to be closed this week in honor of our annual holiday sabbatical, we couldn’t resist popping into the office to do a quick update.

So what did Montgomery find? Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.

Here is the breakdown of percentiles:


Congratulate yourself and keep on reading!

Wow, this is AMAZING! What DO people do with all their time? They can't all be watching TikTok, can they?

Great job @Catfish_Fan

My only goal this year is to read 28+ books by December 31st.