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2023 Reading Stats

My reading habits shifted a lot from 2022 to 2023. I read a similar number of books, but expanded into reading more genres.  Three main trends drove this change: 

  1. Horror. This year I started reading horror. In nearly every case, I thought I was picking up a fantasy or sci-fi book with an edgy cover, only to learn after I'd finished that it was horror. And despite my firm stance as a scaredy cat, some of those horror books were my most-enjoyed novels! This opened my eyes to a whole new genre that I'm excited to continue exploring in 2024. 
  2. Beta-reads. I did a lot more beta-reading in 2023 than in 2024. This was intentional and part of my writing goals for the year, and it's cool to see how much of my reading pie those books take up. What's not cool is that none of those count for my goodreads total...yet. 
  3. Non-fiction. This year I brought back the early-pandemic habit of reading a non-fiction book for 30 minutes at the end of the work day, during what used to be transit time. That habit netted non-fiction a bump from 10 percent of my total reading to 25 percent. I knew I read a lot of non-fiction this year to prepare for writing Predacide, but I didn't think it would be that substantial! 

The impact of all these changes appears to be that I read a lot less fantasy/sci-fi than in the previous year. Problematic, if I'm trying to keep up with changes in the market as I write my own work. However, my data mask a truth we've all been enjoying this year...increasingly, books don't fall into one category or another. And I read at least 6 books with a romance A plot and a fantasy setting that I counted as romance, not fantasy. With that taken into account, the fantasy/sci-fi decline is not quite as stark. 

Favorite books of 2023: 

In no particular order: When Women Were Dragons; Meander, Spiral, Explode; We Need New Stories; A Swim in the Pond in the Rain; Jade Legacy; The Last Binding series; A House With Good Bones

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