Have You Read This One?

I pondered a little of what kind of stats I could include here that wasn’t just a repeat of the trimestral posts. I started to summarise my reading in a Google sheet and I might have gone overboard. I could generate diagrams and everything! Prepare for a long post.

In total, I read 79 novels, novellas, short stories, graphic novels and poetry. My two busiest reading month were July (unusual that I read so much during my time off) and December. I had a total average rating of 3.34 and an average book length of 309 pages. Grain of salt of the book pages, I had to try to convert the audiobooks to pages somehow.

My book collection grew with 18 books, and I read 15 from my own shelf that previously were unread, resulting in a growth of unread books by +3.

The majority of my books were aqcuired from my audiobook service. Even though the percentage is quite low on the library, I think it has increased a bit from previous years. I’m getting back to the library!

A non-surprising connection from book acquired to book format is that the audio and ebooks takes the biggest chunk, since I have access to both audio and ebooks on my audiobook service and can sometimes switch between them seamlessly.

It was a bit tricky to divide them into only one genre each but in either case, fantasy was the winner here.

I read 68% in English and 32% in Swedish.

The origin language of the books were mainly English. At the very end of the year, I read two graphic novels translated from Koren which entered a new language. Spoiler alert: we’re going to see more of this in 2026, I have eight more volumes to go.

78.5% were books in a series and 21.5% were standalone. I thought a while about how to do this one, because some of these series are books that really are interconnected books with different main characters but can be read as standalones, but ended up putting them in series since I thus far have chosen to read them in series order rather than as standalone books.

Series that I read the most from were: Mercy Thompson by Patricia Briggs (5), The Good Guys by Eric Ugland (5) and Innkeeper Chronicles by Ilona Andrews (5). I were going to list top authors also but you also see them in this same list.

15% of the books I read were re-reads and 35% were authors I’ve never read from before.

Original publication years I read from the most were 2023 (7), 2021 (6), 2024 (6) and 2019 (4). What pleasantly surprised me was that I read 3 books from 1953, two of these were picked for the work book circle without us realising beforehand that they were published the same year.

The final count for my different time blocks:
– 1919: 1
1920-1939: 4
1940-1959: 8
1960-1979: 3
1980-1999: 9
2000-2019: 28
2020-2025: 25

The final ambitious thing I decided to add to my book list was how much money I saved by not buying books. I here tried to find what it would have cost me to buy the book that I borrowed from the library or listen/read from my audiobook service. Here I removed the monthly cost from my audiobook subscription. I was perhaps not completely consistent in how I chose the price to count. Sometimes I did listen to an audiobook that I already own a physical copy and therefore picked what it would have cost to buy the audiobook. In some cases, I picked the the physical book even though I listened to it because if I would have bought it, I wouldn’t have bought the audiobook. And, in some cases, there was only one option to choose from regardless of format. It did total into 5842 SEK (about 544,5 Euro or 635,55 USD according to Google’s converter at time of writing this post).

Did I accomplish my 2025 reading goals?

Read 50 books – this one is both yes and no. I set the goal lower to give room for thicker books and at least one book in German. I did exceed the number by 29 so I did accomplish reading 50, but I didn’t read what I gave room for so maybe just a half tick on this goal.

Read at least two of my thickest books – at that time I had an list of books that I would tick off. I finished none on that list, I did start one though and spend a lot of time reading it in January.

Read one book in German – no, not even started one.

Make a Tetris blanket – not sure how much this was a goal and how much this was just an idea and project, I’ll include a summary of it anyhow. I’m sure I was very ambitious at the start of the year and thought that I would finish this with no problem. Didn’t think about that each book would generate 4 squares and that I might read more than intended. Life happened which put the project on a bit of a pause. I made 93 squares and have 107 to go. I have started blocking and attaching at the same time to avoid getting stuck in one task. I’ll give you the occational update on the blanket to let you know how it’s going.

While putting these statistics together, I’ve been playing around what my goals for 2026 will be. Some of these numbers inspired me to look in other areas this coming year. In 2025 I looked a lot at original publication year to get different squares for the blanket, in 2026 I’ll still keep track but I don’t think it’ll impact my reading choises as much. I’ll give it some more thoughts and have a separate post for that soon.

Do you keep track of what you are reading or just go with the flow?