Matt's Books and Music

My 2024 reading year has come to a close, and while it didn’t quite hit the heights of 2023 for me, it was still a wonderful bookish year. If you’re interested, please check out my Bookish Superlatives (parts 1 and 2), and my Top Reads from the year.

Today I’d like to look at the year as a whole and look at some statistics about some of the things I was looking out for this year.

While I read less than in 2023, I still read an obscene 352 books in 2024. I mention this only because the volume of books I read can skew some of the percentages. For example, if only 5% of my reading came from a particular community or demographic, that still means I read 17-18 books from that community, which is far from nothing!

My average-rated book scored a whopping 4.4⭐ in 2024, by far my highest annual average. This was remarkably consistent across all of the areas I looked at below, so I’ll only note ratings when they differ significantly from the average.

New Releases, Backlist and Classics

Estimates suggest that about 2,000 books are published in English alone every week. So, it’s easy to get caught up in the treadmill of staying on top of the latest releases. To try to mitigate this, I try to be intentional about not getting distracted by the new and shiny and buzzy titles, and spend as much time as I can on great backlist titles.

• Classics (pre-1975): 8.2% (n = 29)
  • pre-1900: 6
  • 1900s: 0
  • 1910s: 0
  • 1920s: 1 (this is so low for me)
  • 1930s: 6
  • 1940s: 2
  • 1950s: 9
  • 1960s-1974: 5
• Backlist (1975-2020: 36.1% (n = 127)
  • 1975-1989: 9 (highest average, 4.6 ⭐)
  • 1990s: 9 (highest average, 4.6 ⭐)
  • 2000s: 13
  • 2010s: 73
  • 2020: 23
• Recent Releases (2021-2023): 29.3% (n = 103)
  • 2021: 20 (lowest average, 4.1 ⭐)
  • 2022: 26
  • 2023: 57
• New Releases (2024): 26.7% (n = 94)

Backlist titles dropped a bit in my reading in 2024 from being nearly half in 2023 to about 44% this year. New Releases represented just slightly over my goal of limiting them to a quarter of my reading.

Looking at the number of books read per decade, the outlier this year was the 1930s, which were far above the decades on either side. The 1950s remained very strong this year, a phenomenon I find interesting considering my general distaste for that decade!

There were some trends in terms of periods that were rated higher or lower than the average, but no trends in the trends themselves — there’s nothing about 2021 that should make its books rate almost a half star lower than 2022. But it’s interesting nonetheless!

Formats, Length, Media, and Other Considerations

• Text (Print or Digital, excl. Graphic Novels): 37.5 % (n = 120) ⬇️
• Audiobooks: 62.5% (n = 220) ⬆️
• Graphic Novels: 3.4.5% (n = 12) ⬇️ (lowest average, 3.8 ⭐)
• Plays: 1.1% (n = 4), (highest average, 5⭐)
• Story Collections: 5.4% (n = 19 (+12)) ⬆️
• Long Books (> 500 pages): 4.2% (n = 15)
• Short books (< 200 pages): 20.7% (n = 73)
• Debuts: 16.5% (n = 58) ⬆️
• Books in Translation: 13.1% (n = 46 (+25)) ⬆️

Audiobooks continued the trend of the past five years of accounting for more and more of my reading. I was a late adopter of this format, but it’s really opened up my reading life. In terms of format, short story collections played an unexpectedly huge role this year — I read 2.7 times the number I’d read the previous year, which was itself a record. It’s far from my preferred genre, but it’s one that seems to be common for emerging writers and those from marginalized communities. Another area that more than doubled from 2023 was translated books. This was an intention of mine this year so I was gratified to see it so high.

Genres & Audiences

I didn’t have any real goals for genres this year, other than continuing my normal habit of reading as widely as possible.

The Numbers

(Note: Since books can fit into many different genres, percentages below will not add up to 100%)

• LGBTQ2S+: 25.9% (n = 91) ⬆️
• Literary Fiction: 22.0% (n = 77) ⬇️
• Historical: 16.25% (n = 58) ⬆️
• Romance: 14.6% (n = 52)
• Science Fiction or Speculative Fiction: 10.8% (n = 38)
• Non-Fiction: 10.5% (n = 37)
  • History: 16
  • Science/ Nature: 21 ⬆️
  • Memoir: 9
  • Spirituality: 3 ⬇️
• Mystery: 9.1% (n = 32)
• Paranormal / Horror: 8.8% (n = 31)
• Fantasy: 6.8% (n = 27)
• Middle Grade & Juvenile: 6.5% (n = 23) ⬇️
• Young Adult: 4.8% (n = 17 (-30)) ⬇️

The biggest thing I noted here is that I succeeded in weeding a wide variety of genres this year. Literary Fiction, which is itself a broad and nebulous category, accounted for the largest share, but even this was less than a quarter of my reading. Non-Fiction accounted for the lowest proportion of my reading in a very long time, due primarily to my lack of a deep dive of study.

Authors and Author Demographics

Most Read Authors:

• C. Rochelle: 6
• Louise Penny (🇨🇦): 6
• Becky Chambers: 5
• Margaret Atwood (🇨🇦): 3
• KJ Charles: 3
• Georges Simenon: 3

Unlike 2023, which was very much a year of authors, this was not a big factor in my 2024 reading. With the exception of the Atwoods, all of these are books in series, and aside from the Chambers, they don’t stand out as being intentional.

Author Demographics

I often say that one of the things I love most about reading is that it opens so many windows into the experiences of people with sometimes wildly different lives form mine. But, because of structural issues within the publishing industry, one has to be intentional about seeking these out. I had a great lesson in this in 2024, when I realized that as January was winding down I had not read a single book by a non-white author! Yikes! But with some greater intentionality, my year ended up being filled with great literature from around the world. And, when in the Fall I decided to be intentional about finding more translated literature, this only increased. The Numbers

Gender and Sexuality

• Female: 52.6% (n = 185)
• Male: 43.5% (n = 153)
• Other: 2.8% (n =a 10)*

• This was a catch-all for various individuals who do not identify within traditional Western gender norms

Culture and Ethnicity

• White: 73% (n = 257)
• Asian (writers from Asia or of Asian Heritage) and Pacific Islanders: 10.6% (n = 37) ⬆️
  • Japanese: 14 ⬆️
  • SW Asia & N. Africa (SWANA): 13 ⬆️
  • Chinese: 3 ⬇️
  • Korean: 3
  • South Asian: 2
  • SE Asian: 2
• Black: 7.1% (n = 25)
  • African American: 14
  • African: 9 ⬆️
  • Black British: 2
• Indigenous (Turtle Island): 4.3% (n = 15)
• Latin American: 2.6% (n = 9)
• Biracial or Mixed Race: 1.4% (n = 5)

More than anything, these numbers prove the point about the ongoing issues with representation in the publishing industry. If someone like me who actively values diverse reading struggles to get more balanced numbers, there’s clearly a big systemic issue at play. The biggest shift within my diverse reading came in a steep increase in Japanese fiction and writings from the broad SWANA region. The latter of these had a particularly outsized impact on my reading, with four titles by SWANA authors making my top ten books of the year.

Nation of Origin

I read books by authors from 33 different countries in 2024. While the heaviest hitters were the obvious anglosphere options, it was great to see so many countries and parts of the world represented this year (Equitorial Guinea, I see you!)

• USA: 169
• United Kingdom: 59
• Canada: 53
• Japan: 12
• Nigeria: 7
• France: 6
• Ireland: 6
• Australia: 5