It’s January and time to take a look back at my year in books.
ANYONE WHO KNOWS ME, KNOWS I 💜 BOOKS!
I love to read, and I have always been an eclectic and voracious reader. While I have a special love of speculative fiction, particularly fantasy, I consistently read across genres and categories. Every book a writer reads can serve as a mentor text. We can learn so much about story and writing craft simply from reading and analyzing books.
I have worked hard to be more accurate about in tracking the books I have read the past few years. Though, I have a tendency to read and track them in batches, rather than one at a time.
There are a lot of great tools for tracking books. I actually use BookBuddy to keep track of my writing books. But for tracking the books I read each year, I still use Goodreads. I find it user friendly, and I like the way I can set up specific book shelves and pull detailed stats for the year. I also like the way you can see all the covers at once and grab a screen shot of that.
MY 2023 READING SUMMARY STATS
According to my tracking:
- I read 90 books.
- My average number of pages per book clocked in at 260. (Almost 40 pages more per book than last year.)
- My total number of pages read hit 23,489. (More than 3K more than last year.)
MY YEAR IN PICTURE BOOKS Because I have book coaching clients writing Picture Books (PB), I read a number of PBs each year. I study these books to help my clients understand the market, what’s being published, how authors and/or illustrators are creating meaningful picture books books for readers. This year, I remembered to track 14 of the PBs I read. I will need to do a better job of tracking these in 2024.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE…
As a freelance editor and book coach, my reading year includes quite a few pre-published manuscripts not represented here. This post covers the post-published works that I consumed in 2023. If you have a Goodreads account, you can find me there. Pop in to my Goodreads profile and see what I am reading. And if you’re interested in reading what I write, you can check out some of my books, like The Healer’s Legacy Trilogy, or my newest MG novel, Lostuns Found. Or, if you like something a little darker, check out my collection of dark fantasy and light horror with a bit of humor. Blood From a Rose.
I also wrote a post for Shepherd’s Best Books of 2023 page about three of my favorite books from my 2023 reading.