The Intrepid Reader and Baker: Sunday Salon: 2024 year in review

Welcome to my annual year in review post!

2024 was a pretty good reading year I think. Initially I set my goal at 75 books for the year but I exceeded that so I revised my goal to 104 books for the year. I did end up reading 120 books during the year, but I am still leaving my goal at 104, as that feels quite doable at a rate of 2 books per week.

You can see all my reading and blogging goals for this year in my recent Top Ten Tuesday post.

Let's get into the stats....

Despite my best intentions I do tend to read a lot of new releases. I ended up reading 75 books that were published in 2024. The oldest book I read was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens which was originally published in 1843.

Genre wise, there are no surprises that my reading is dominated by general fiction (which is a kind of catch all for all sorts of books), historical fiction and contemporary romance.I did read 4 non fiction books last year, which seems to be about my normal amount.

One of the things that has changed over the last few years is that I am reading a lot more British authors. This is mainly because of the blog tours that I am doing which feature of couple of British publishers. One of my goals for this year is to focus a little more on Australian authors.

Not sure why there was a dip in March, but most of the rest of the year was pretty consistent in terms of the number of books read per month.

No surprises here really. My preferred reading format is definitely e-books these days. I do so enjoy the paper book experience when I have it though.

From a blogging perspective, I do have a fairly established routine. I will pretty much always post on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, and a couple of Sundays a month and then as needed on other days of the week.

Some other stats:

I read 44 new to me authors in 2024, which is 37%.

The authors who I did read multiple books by were Maggie Christensen with 5 books,and Antoine Laurain with 4 books. This is the fourth year in a row that Maggie Christensen has been my most read author. I also read 3 books each from Gillian Harvey, Rebecca Raisin, Sandy Barker and Toshikazu Kawaguchi

I don't do a lot of rereads at the best of times. This year there were four rereads. Two of those are Hogfather by Terry Pratchett and The Secret History of Christmas by Bill Bryson which are now both part of my annual Christmas traditions.

As always my reading is always skewed to read a lot more women authors than men. This year I read 76 books by female authors and 44 by men.

A new statistic that I started recording this year is whether I have reviewed a book or not. I don't intend to go back to reviewing every single book I read, but I am pleasantly surprised that I reviewed 60% of the books I read.

The final statistic for me to share relates to the grades that I have given out. I am always pretty stingy with my 5 star grades, with the vast majority of my reads being a 4/5 if I liked it. Here are the grades for what I have read this year. There was one book that I gave 2.5 and only 3 that I gave 5/5 grades to. Those 3 books were: