2022 Reading wrap-up
Happy New Year!
(It’s still okay to say that, right?!)
To kick off this new blog I wanted to do a blog post about what I love most in the world: READING.
And to make it extra sexy I thought I’d bring in some NUMBERS.
Before we dive in, time for a bit of a nerd-confession: since 2011, I have been tracking the number of books I’ve read per year. Even worse: I also track the number of pages per book, and then use that to get a reading average of how many pages a day I get through. Why? For no good reason at all, unless writing about it 12 years later in a little blog in a far, far corner of the internet counts as one.
Self-servingly, it’s also intriguing for me to go back to my book list from 2011 and see what I was reading back then: that seems to have been the year I discovered China Miéville and Margo Lanagan, gave up on George R.R. Martin, re-read my favourite book of all time (I’ll do a blog post about what it is and how it completely changed my life, at some point), and read everything David Mitchell had written up until that point. Seeing a title on my list I can even remember where I was when I read it; what city I lived in. In 2011 I left Aberdeen after many years living there as a student, and moved to Oxford for a job in academic publishing (sadly, my job turned out to have very little to do with books, or even publishing). I remember reading The Ritual by Adam Nevill in a new flat-share with someone who eventually became a close friend but back then was a stranger. I was cooped up in my bedroom, thrumming with anxious energy, and—bizarrely, perhaps—found solace in what’s quite an anxious book.
Incidentally, 2011 was also when I was still somewhat thinking of maybe one day doing a PhD, perhaps, and so my reading list includes such classics of narrative adventure as An Apology For Poetry: or, the Defence of Poesy by Sir Philip Sidney, and a (re)read of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.
Anyway, I digress.
2022 was also a year of big transitions. I started a sabbatical from my job as Product Lead at a tech startup in order to do more writing. I’d gone part-time earlier, so I was spending proportionally more time writing than I had ever before in my adult life, but I found myself getting frayed at two ends: either I was constantly catching up at work trying to figure out which meetings I’d missed when I was off, or I was trying to get back into the flow of what I was writing. Consequently, I wasn’t really enjoying anything I was doing and was just getting stressed with a severe case of FOMO.
So I stopped working (with the support of my kind, generous, benevolent husband) and decided to focus on writing—just writing!—for the time being.
(Of course, as soon as I started my sabbatical I got COVID and was pretty sick for almost a month. Boy did I regret not having paid sick leave at that point. Never mind.)
So what kind of reading year was 2022 for me? Well, I read 113 books with an average length of 327.74 pages per book. I read 101.47 pages per day and on average spent 3.23 days per book.
Now, this might sound like a lot, but it’s actually a bit of a drop-off from the year before: in 2021, I read 125 books with an average of 332.33 pages per book, 2.92 days per book and 113.81 pages per day. (And I listened to a handful of audio books in 2021 too, which I didn’t really do last year.)
So what gives?! Was I just draped over the sofa staring at the ceiling, thinking big writerly thoughts all year long? Neglecting my TBR?!
Not exclusively. I do think, though, that being so much more focused on writing my own fiction made it harder to be drawn to others’ books. After a big day of pomodoro-methoding, what I craved the most was to get some fresh air; not any of this “curling up with a good book”-nonsense.
Having said all that: I am aware that I read a lot, so I’m not worried that my numbers took a slight dive last year. In fact, I’m embracing taking all the dives this year! I’m reading to enjoy myself, to learn how other people write, to get a little peek into other lives. I’m going to be more binary about this in 2023, I think. Am I reading? Yes, I am. Am I enjoying it? Good. Case closed.
A couple of other data points: in 2022 I read 12 books in Finnish and 101 in English. This is pretty representative of what’s on my TBR-shelf, too, to be honest. In the past few years I’ve really enjoyed getting back into reading in Finnish. It’s different from reading in English: it seems to use a different part of my brain. I don’t write a whole lot in Finnish (though I’d love to do more) but I think I need to considerably up my Finnish intake if I’m to be able to write a full novel in Finnish after so long spent abroad and existing in another language.
Lastly, 10 of the books I read last year were non-fiction, the rest fiction. This I’m actually a bit surprised by: I feel like I’ve read more non-fiction in previous years. But, as ever, the pendulum has already swung back: 2 of the 4 books I’ve read this year so far are non-fiction, so perhaps there’ll be more of those the rest of the year too.
Next blog post will cover my top ten-ish books from 2022, so come back for that one if you like! (Please).