Le bilan de l'annee - 2024

GRAPHS!!!!

Hi hello it’s time for my favorite post of the year:¹ GRAPHS!!!!

Now, where are these graphs coming from, you ask. I’m so glad you did. They are coming from The Storygraph, a Goodreads alternative that has GRAPHS. (I’ll stop now.)

I switched from Goodreads to The Storygraph a few years ago, and haven’t looked back. I have nothing in particular against Goodreads, but my reasons for switching included:

• not supporting Amazon (Goodreads is owned by Amazon, who, despite their immense capital, has yet to update the Goodreads site to have an interface better than a rickety 2007 website)

• supporting a small business

• supporting a female, POC business owner and

• GRAPHS!!!²

The Storygraph has functionality that Goodreads does not, namely: the ability to rate books by half and quarter stars, and data that breaks down what you’re reading and what genres you might like. There are also many features I don’t usually avail myself of including but not limited to: buddy reads, contests (like Goodreads!), and various ways to track your pages. Side note that they have both a free and paid premium tier, and I have the paid version, which does include most of the graphics. This post isn’t sponsored by The Storygraph; I just love them so much.

Ok now that my plug for The Storygraph is over, let’s go look at some graphs of how my year looked. Without further ado…

Graphs!!!!

First, I am getting all of this data from The Storygraph’s yearly reading wrap-up. Like Goodreads, The Storygraph data is self supplied, meaning I have to log the books I’m reading. There’s always a margin of error with the edition of book you’re reading and what the publisher/online says, so some of the data (like page numbers and hours) may be a little less than exact.

To kick off, this nice little summary graphic showing the first, last, longest and shortest books I read this year.

If it’s hard to read, that would be:

• First: Fourth Wing

• Last: Le livre de ma mère

• Longest: A Court of Wings and Ruin (at 703 pages and I felt every single one of them)

• Shortest: Not Waving but Drowning (at 48 pages)

My top authors were all women, which tracks. Could do better on diversity there, but those are just the authors I read the most books of.

Next, mood. Apparently I am depressing??

The caption on this is:

You engaged in introspective musings, traversed landscapes of the heart, and set off on thrilling quests. The narratives flowed at a comfortable, engaging tempo.

Ok then! Here’s my mood map compared to the friends I have on The Storygraph, hence why I think I’m depressing.

Not sure why only some of these graphics have nice pdf images I can save and others do not. Anyways, onwards!

Here’s how many books/pages I read in a different format. Just like 2023, I had a huge reading dip about a third of the way through the year. Let’s not make this a 2025 trend too, shall we?

Here we have all of the genres that I read in 2024. Again - no surprises. Like I said in my 2024 Superlatives post, Fourth Wing was my romantasy gateway drug and I have read so many of those this year; that’s why romance is up so high this year. Nothing against romance - it’s just not a genre I tend to read a lot of. Unless there are dragons I guess.

Now, this stat is incorrect. Not through any fault of The Storygraph, but through my own laissez-faire reporting. Like the book in the photo there? The Misinformation Age? Oh yeah it DEFINITELY took me more than 1 day to read that thing. So this data is just…bad, as we say in the technology industry.

I usually read a book in anywhere from 3-10 days, but I didn’t record that data well this year. Right now, it looks like it takes me 23 days to read a book. That’s something I’m going to try to be better about this year so that in December of 2025, I’ll have an accurate idea of the average time it does take me to read a book.

I’m just going to sum up a few of the other stats that I got from my Reading Wrap-up that don’t have nice pictographs:

• Out of the books I read, the one that was most shelved was A Court of Thorns and Roses, with 689,898 users reading it in 2024.

• On the other side of that spectrum, only 2 other users read kiss & release by Anthony DiPietro. Gonna give this book its own little moment because it had a great cover, and was a nice book of poetry by a local RI author. Though not going to lie - I kind of love it that my reading tastes vary so widely that I am reading both wildly popular and wildly obscure books. That brings joy.

  

• Ashes & Stones (one of my Superlative winners for 2024!) had the highest ranking of any book I read, with 4.88 stars. Which is wild to me because I didn’t think it was that good, in fact, I was left wanting more about the author’s own emotional journey, but it just goes to show everyone’s taste is completely subjective. (Except mine, which is perfect.)

• I explored the works of 76 ‘new’ authors. This is most likely inaccurate in the sense that I was aware of many of the authors listed (like I knew who Kurt Vonnegut and Marguerite Yourcenar were) but I had just never read anything by them. Or read anything by them and recorded it The Storygraph. Semantics.

• 36 of the books I read were part of a series.

• And I only re-read one book last year (Fourth Wing.)

• I read 1% more books in 2024 than 2023, and 14% more pages.

• And then some summarizations of the ~types~ of books I tend to gravitate towards:

  

  And lastly, because this is an absolutely *insane* photo, here is every single book I read in 2024:

That is my username on The Storygraph, so feel free to friend me if you’d like! And with that, our journey through the wilds of GRAPHS!!! ends for another year.

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No New Books™️ Challenge

Still holding strong! And plan to for a while! No cheating here! Except I learned about a new special edition vampire book that’s on sale in February so…

• Current streak: 14 days (January 1st - Present)

Mug Moment of the Week

Remember how back in October my friend Sam and I went to Charleston and I featured this as a guest mug?

Gosh, such a good mug. Anyways, I posted this mug on my Instagram, admiring it, joking about taking it, and within 30 minutes, two different people and the CAFE I WAS SITTING IN had messaged me to tell me that this mug was from East Fork Pottery in Asheville, North Carolina. Back in late September, Hurricane Helene absolutely devastated that region. So when my brother asked me what I wanted for Christmas, me, being an enterprising person who loves mugs and supporting small business said: a mug from East Fork Pottery.

Behold, my brother delivered, and this is the second of my Christmas mugs:

I cannot describe how good this mug is! The nice sleek handle, which feels so smooth. The heft, the stone bottom. Truly a 10/10 mug and I have been using it pretty much constantly since I unpacked it two weeks ago. Mine is green, not pink, and BIGGER than the one I used in Charleston. Which honestly was a good call on my brother’s part because I need an actual tankard of tea around me at all times. Thanks Chris!

That concludes our rewind to 2024. Now that I’m done with all that, what bookish tales shall I regale you with next? Maybe I’ll tell you about the time I went on a Writing Trip to Cuba and succumbed to agua mala. That might be fun. In any event, until next week!

1. I’m not even joking. I love graphs so much.

2. I lied.