2024: Reading Wrapped

January 3, 2025

Happy new year! It’s common for humans to do some thinking and self evaluating during the turn of the year. I am no different, and I look forward to this season so I can finally look back at my favorite spreadsheet, my “Books read.xls” (jokes, I use google sheets not microsoft), and reflect on my reading.

LOOK I am not trying to brag. This just… happened. I didn’t particularly make an effort to read less or more this year, my effort this year was to read and think deep thoughts about what I had just read, and write reviews about those books and those thoughts. And somehow, I read 155 books… 🤪 I did lag on the review portion in the second half of the year. It was a mix of a very busy new role at work and also a bit of self-censure. Turns out I am still scared about sharing my “deep” thoughts. What if they’re not deep? What if they’re not original? Oh well, something to work on the new year again.

Now let’s look at some data about those 155 books I read this year.

My to-be-read (TBR) pile is always my number one concern every year. I had a bit of some sort of fever during the pandemic (but avoided the actual virus, so it was a fever of my own making) and bought-way-too-many-books™. So since 2020, my goal has been to get my TBR to a reasonable number. At least, I should read more books from my pile than add books to it. And so far, I have been successful with the latter: this is the fourth year in a row where I read more books than added. Okay, so the difference was only of 5 books, but hey! The number is slowly going down. And I kept to my goal of not adding more than 50 new books to the pile this year (“adding” is the word I chose here instead of “buying” because of this number of 45 new books added to the pile, 11 were gifts or free). And 45 new books in one year, is the lowest number of new books per year since I started tracking it in 2020. 😉 Progress is being made.

Where we started: at the end of 2020, I had 101 books on my TBR. Now, as we enter 2025, I have 64, and none of those 64 are books bought in 2020 or 2021. So all of them were added after 2022, which means they have not been sitting on the pile for long! Next year, I only want non 2022 books to still be left in the pile. And that shouldn’t be too complicated, there are only 13 books left from 2022.

One downside though: this year I read way less from my TBR than last year. Last year I managed to remove 65 books from my TBR (but added 60 🤪), but this year I only read 50. A couple of very long books in my TBR slowed me down, but that’s okay.

Goals for my TBR for 2025: I need to chill on borrowing books from the library. Buying books is not my TBR’s number one enemy, the library is. You’ll see later on this post what I mean (spoiler alert, 2/3 of my reading this year were library books). Next year I really want to read more of the books I own, because I have a lot of books I’m really excited about.

Out of the 155 books I’ve read, I rated 20 of them 5 stars, and 20 4.5 stars. That means that about 25% of my reads this year were books I really really liked! I want to do a deep dive on those 40 books in another post, so keep an eye out on your inboxes for that post sometime in January. But for the purposes of this 2024 review, the books that really stood out this year for me were:

Writers & Lovers, Lily King (Literary Fiction)
Casey, is a struggling artist trying to finish her first novel, but her life was seriously derailed after a bad break up and her mom dying.

The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng (Historical Fiction)
This book has two main characters: a woman and a writer living their lives in Malaysia in the 1920s. As the story unfolds, secrets are slowly revealed.

Thank You For Listening, Julia Whelan (Contemporary romance, 🌶️)
A behind the scenes look into audiobook making and romance writing.

The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo (Fantasy, Historical Fiction)
Great fantasy that reads like historical fiction, it’s funny and not too deep, and I couldn’t put it down.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden (Historical Fiction + Fantasy)
The story of a WWI nurse going back into the war zone to find out what happened to her brother, a Canadian soldier who went missing in action and is presumed dead.

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Sci-fi)
An office worker gets assigned to watch over a time traveler to make sure he adapts to his new timeline. But there’s also some romance and a lot of spy thriller vibes.

Um Defeito de Cor, Ana Maria Gonçalves (Historical Fiction)
This book tells the entire life story of an enslaved woman taken to Brazil in the early 1800s. Unfortunately this book has not been translated to English yet.

Real Americans, Rachel Khong (Historical Fiction)
It’s the story of three generations of one family (grandmother, mother, son), and the lengths we go to make sure our kids have everything.

Blood Over Bright Haven, M. L. Wang (Fantasy)
This is an adult fantasy stand alone novel with dark academia vibes. It’s about a woman being unapologetic about being smart and ambitious, and it’s also about the lies and exploitation our systems are built on.

I already mentioned the library’s evil mastermind plan to keep me from my TBR. Therefore, the graph above should be no surprise to you. I borrowed over 100 books this year from the library, saving me $1,400 if, for some reason, I had decided to buy them all at full Amazon e-book price/Audible credit (I choose to track those numbers instead of a hardcover/audiobook full price for the book for tracking, because I would in most cases buy a new book as a digital file, and I would only use Audible credits, and wouldn’t pay full price—if I was tracking full prices, the number of savings would look higher, but it wouldn’t be reflective of my actual spending habits). I do also buy some books used, I sell some of my read books and exchange them for other books, and I use gift cards for books. And I have wonderful friends who delight into making my TBR taller (and I love you all for it).

How does this compare to last year? Well, the library was less of an issue, so I only saved about $1,000 last year, and spent over $600.

Out of the 155 books I read this year, 88 (!!!) of them were written by authors I have never read before (if the books were part of a series, and I read the series, I only counted the first book in the series as a “never read before author”)! That’s over half. This means I continue to explore genres and authors and don’t stick with just my faves (more on this later!). And you know why this is so great? If you go back and look at my top eight books of the year, six of them were written by authors I had never read before till this year. And that’s reason enough to branch out, you never know where you’ll find a new fave.

A third of the books I read this year were part of a series. I read a lot of fantasy and romance, which usually are written as series, but the two biggest culprits of this year’s series-extravaganza were a spy series (Slough House by Mick Herron) and a Sci-Fi series (Murderbot by Martha Wells). Those two alone were 18 books. Funny that none of them made into my favorite books of the year list, but each series had at least a couple of volumes that made into my top 40.

I didn’t re-read a lot this year, which was understandable considering how many books the library pushed on me. Last year I got to nine rereads.

And out of all books I started this year, I only didn’t finish two. And one of them was an audiobook that I then picked up as an ebook and finished. So technically I only didn’t finish one book. It was The Book of Love, by Kelly Link.

Now for some rapid fire numbers:

Average time it takes me to read a book is 8 days. Of course that varies by book, a handful were read in one day, and another handful took 50-90 days to read. But in average, it takes me about a week to read each book I start, because I read multiples at the same time.
I listened to a bit less audiobooks this year, but not by much, just 13 hours. 401 hours of audiobook is about 13k pages. I love audiobooks, they’re my companions for crafting and folding the laundry. If I didn’t have audiobooks, the laundry would simply never get folded.
Actual book pages read, I ended the year with almost 41k pages read. That’s about 112.3 pages a day.
The average length of books read was 296 pages (more on that later).
The shortest book I read was 156 pages. I excluded short stories from this, but technically, the shortest “book” I read this year was a 10 page short story by Martha Wells that was set in her Murderbot series in between volumes. They are counted as “books” in my overall count because they do exist individually in reading apps. But before you call “FOUL!” only four books I read this year had less than 100 pages, so they don’t really sway my numbers that much.
My favorite book of the year was also the longest book I read this year, 1,285 pages (it took me three months to read it).

What happened in December! *Only* eight books read?!?!? Remember when I said I don’t watch much TV? In December, I watched a lot of TV. July was very slow at work, so that’s probably where the extra books came from.

Fiction vs Nonfiction: the results you see here are pretty standard for me. I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction.

Borrowed vs Owned: Remember the evil librarians I mentioned several times already? THERE YOU GO: 66% of all books read were borrowed from the library. Positively evil! My Libby app notifications were popping this year, and I had to “deliver later” a lot of them because I always had so many borrowed. But I’m committing, next year, to no more than 50% borrowed books. If I want to borrow a new book, I need to finish a TBR book first. “Deliver later” will be my best friend (last year 50% of the books I read were library books, and 43% were books I owned).

A couple paragraphs above, you read about the very short “books” I read this year and called me a cheater (yeah, I heard you!), but I did tell you I’d address that, and here we are. Yes, I read a couple of very short books (almost 1/3 of my reads were less than 300 pages). But look at that very big number for mid-size books: 67%. That’s a lot of medium-sized books. Now that I’ve been absolved of my “that doesn’t count as a book!” crimes, we can go look at the other controversial data: book format.

One fourth of all books I’ve read this year were audiobooks. And I can hear a couple of readers screaming with gusto “audiobooks are not books!” One, what a snob you are, and two, yes they are. Audiobooks tell a story, the exact same story with the same words and chapters as the written book. Don’t believe me? What about the evil library, would you believe them? Fairfax Co. Library in Virginia says: “A 2016 study found ‘no significant difference in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously.’” [Source]

Okay, say you really don’t think audiobooks count. In that case, I “only” read 117 books this year (still more than you, audiobook snob).

Okay, we’re past the controversies and onto our next data point: top authors. This year a friend recommended the Slough House book series and the TV show inspired by it, Slow Horses on Apple TV. And now I have a new favorite comfort read. I devoured all books and short stories in this series, and even gifted myself the whole series in paperback for my birthday. If you love spy thrillers, those are an interesting twist on the genre. I do not recommend them in audio though, too many points of view, it gets confusing.

Another stand out author and series I read this year was Martha Wells Murderbot series. I know with a name like this it sounds like a terrible read, but this is actually a very cozy sci-fi series. If you love TJ Klune or The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, then you might also enjoy Murderbot.

The other authors in this list that I read 3 books from each, were all (with the exception of McTiernan), complete series I started and finished this year. Kuang’s The Poppy War series is absolutely haunting and a masterpiece of modern fantasy. Rosaria Munda’s Fireborne series is everything Fourth Wing wanted to be but didn’t even get close to. And I also read the Howl’s Moving Castle series by Diana Wynne Jones because I acquired an edition illustrated by one of my favorite artists. This is a great classic series for a young reader in your life, if you happen to know one of those rare middle schoolers who likes to read.

And finally, I have a yearly goal of reading at least 20 books that were not written by American or British authors (since they are what I read the most). This year I read 21 books from 12 different countries, with most books being from either Brazil or Japan. Slowly, I’m trying to read around the world. There’s a great TikTok influencer, Courtney Henning Novak, who’s reading alphabetically and has a lot of really good recommendations if you want to read more broadly too.

And with that, the 2024 reading season comes to an end! I’ll get to writing that post on my top 40 reads later for you and see what we can learn about my favorite books of the year.

What’s next for 2025 reads?

I decided to not have a reading goal next year. I’ll just read, no number is too small.
I’ll prioritize TBR books over “evil” library books.
I’ll try to not add more than 40 books to my TBR.
I’ll continue writing monthly reports on what I’m reading.

Thank you for reading along this year 🥺

PS: I hope you know I love libraries and was just kidding calling them evil. They’re the best thing in the whole world. FREE books! I love you libraries.

My first self-drafted quilt pattern, shown here at the “pieced top complete” phase, before the batting and backing and long-arming phases are done (Yes, the one block that the white stripes don’t align perfectly with the next block’s stripes bothers me, but when creating something new, you can give yourself some room for imperfection).

Quilting as a Designer

June 26, 2024

A go-to icebreaker of mine is to tell folks I am a serial-hobbyist. As in, I’m someone who loves to take on a new hobby, and can often. be found exclaiming “as if I need a new hobby!” when someone shows off their new mugs they just made in a pottery class (but seriously, should I take pottery?). Almost a decade ago now, a friend of mine really wanted to learn quilt making, but she didn’t want to go to the classes alone, and she knew I’d be the easiest person to convince to such a thing.

I’ll admit I wasn’t super hooked on my first try. I finished the quilt from the class, it was cute. But I was much more into sewing clothes than quilts. I had a whole shelf of novelty print fabrics waiting to. become shirt dresses!

This quilt is one of my early-in-the-pandemic projects, and is shown here after the long arming. Photo by Orlando Ramos.

And then… (you know what’s coming!) the pandemic hit. Why make new clothes when I didn’t have anywhere to wear them to? One of the big draws of making your own clothes is that they are unique and people will always comment on them, and you can say “I made it (and it has pockets!)!’

So, with piles of fabric and no inspiration for clothes, I started to quilt again. And 4 years later, I have made over 20 quilt projects (from wall hangings to queen size quilts), and even attempted my first pattern from scratch (the colorful rainbow quilt you’ll see within the photos posted here). I joined a mystery quilt group where you don’t know what you’re sewing but every week you get new instructions as you slowly put stuff together to find out what it is (what a fun community!).

Process of creating my self-drafted rainbow quilt pattern: After creating the pattern pieces on illustrator, I cut
and pieced together a mock up in a variety of scrap fabrics. Once I was happy the pieces were working together,
I cut into my main fabrics and slowly pieced each block till I had the whole quilt. The long-arming was done by a
different seamstress that specializes in that (and this being such a special quilt, I wanted all the bells and whistles).

And of course, being a designer, I have a tremendous advantage when it comes to crafting. My day job is a craft. I deal with colors and shapes and placement. It’s natural that in my free time those same skills are bumping around in my head, and it’s easy to make the swap from pixels to fabric. Knowing how illustrator and quilting works is how I was able to design my own pattern pieces. I knew about seam allowance and how to add them to my vectors (design the patter pieces as their finished size, then add a .25 inch border around it, voila, easy seam allowance and zero math!). And picking colors that will go together is so easy when you know color theory and can use software to mock the finished quilt up with the colors you chose.

When just the top pieces are sewn together, it almost looks like a glass mosaic art in sunlight. This is one of my current work on progress quilts. I am quilting it myself, without using the services of a long-armer this time.

I also believe that my crafting pursuits outside of my work hours are important to keep my mind fresh and creative, in different ways than how I am at my job. And having those moments and working with different mediums, can only make me a better professional graphic designer too. Quilting also teaches you a tremendous amount about patience, attention to detail while also letting go of perfection, and the value of craft. All things important for a designer to have. When you’re making a quilt, you have many steps, many of them incredibly repetitive, parts you don’t really love to do (binding and pressing for me) but are part of the process and a quilt can’t exist without it. And a craft like this is also a lesson in mindfulness and meditation.

Basically, what I’ve been saying is… get a hobby!!!! Do something with your hands, learn something new, just cause. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you don’t even have to stick with it if you don’t like it. But at least try it! It’s good for you, even if it adds nothing to your professional development. I have been trying to make a case here that quilting is great for my design career (and it is), but I’d do it even if it meant nothing. It’s like reading to me, it’s my self care and my passion.

One of the first “mystery” quilt sew along I joined. I had no idea what the final top would look like till after 6 weeks working on it! I love how the earthy colors work with the accent brights, it was a risky combo that payed off.

Note: if you try quilting (or knitting, or crochet), I hope you like blankets. I don’t know who needs six lap blankets in their living room couch, but at least I live somewhere where it’s cold for nine months of the year.

2023: Reading Wrapped

January 2, 2024

Hello and welcome to my first post of 2024! I’ve been waiting ALL year to write this wrap up of my reading stats for 2023. My spreadsheets are more complex than ever and my brain more scrambled than last year because of it, so let’s go look at some numbers.

I’ve read 136 books in 2023, and had set out to read at least 120 (about 2/week). I don’t personally worry too much about those numbers though, because I also like to make some goals more intentional. For example, this past year I also wanted to read my TBR (to-be-read pile, aka books I already own), read more books not originally written in English, read more of the books that have been lingering in my library wishlist, and to finish reading the entire catalog of a couple of my favorite authors. Of those, I’m happy to report that my goal of reading 15 books not written in English—but translated to English or Portuguese, of course, as I only speak those two fluently—I surpassed it by reading 22 books that fit that criteria. For the backlog of my library wishlist, I set a goal of borrowing 2 a month from that list for a total of 24 a year, and ended up borrowing and finishing 27 of those. As for some of the other goals, I made graphs for them, so I’ll talk about them later.

Books read per month graph. January 11, February 10, March 9, April 14, May 9, June 14, July 10, August, September, October and November 11, December 15

This year’s new graph is the books-read-per-month graph you can see above. Nothing too fancy about it, but I just wanted to see what months I read more or less and see if I can figure out why. For example, in May I had my parents visiting for two weeks, so I only managed to read 9 books (but can’t remember why I only read 9 in March, most likely I wasn’t in the mood!). April, June, and December were the months I read the most, and I think they correlate with months I crafted the least.

Some more fun numbers to digest: of the 136 books I read this year, in average, it takes me a little over 8 days to read each of them. The one that took me the longest to read (34 days) was the Neuromancer, which is not a long book, but I started reading right before my parents came to visit, and also a couple of library holds came up that took priority over it. But quite a few books I read in one day: four graphic novels and a few novellas under 100 pages.

Let’s look at page numbers next, I read 33,444 pages this past year (ebooks and printed books) and listened to over 400 hours of audiobooks equivalent to over 13,000 pages if printed. The shortest book I read was 56 pages long, a surprise novella release for the Brandon Sanderson kickstarter campaign from 2022 (which delivered the goodies in 2023). I had no idea I was going to get that book, but I read it the day it hit my inbox. The longest book I read this year was actually a re-read of Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest, one of my favorite books ever. I wanted to re-read it in the occasion of our trip to Ireland, as most of Marillier’s books are set in Ireland and based on its myths and legends.

The average page number per book was 352 pages, but in the pie chart above, you can see the split between length of books read. Most books I read are around 300-500 pages, and very few times last year I picked long books to read (only 10!). Although, I finished 2023 with 85% of David Copperfield read, which is a 900 page book, so let’s say I read 10.85 books with over 500 pages in 2023. 😂

I also listened to a lot more audiobooks than I did last year (414 hours this year versus 291 hours last year, 42% increase!) and yet, I still read a lot more “traditional” books than audiobooks: 72% of all books read in 2023 were either printed or ebooks. I prefer ebooks because they are easier on the eyes as I can adjust the font size for my tired graphic-designer eyes. On a typical day, you’ll find me with a paper book in the morning while drinking my tea before work, with an ebook on my phone while I’m on the treadmill or out and about waiting for something, with an audiobook on my ears while I’m sewing or crocheting at night, and with a kindle book before bed. That’s the main reason why I read so many books at once (usually 3 at a time), because I have a preferred type for each occasion. The goal is to always be reading.

I’m more of a fiction reader, but in the last few years I have discovered what kind of nonfiction I love—history and memoirs—and have been reading a lot more than I used to (from 1-2 a year max to 15+ every year for a few years!). Toxic Wives: Murder, Media and the Poison Panic in America was one of my favorite reads this year, written by one of my friends, Christy Seifert. I also really enjoyed reading Prince Harry’s memoir early in the year, even though it was a very awkward book.

The next pie chart above, you can see the percentage of books read that were borrowed (from the library mostly) versus books that I already owned (purchased or gifted). This year I did pretty well 50/50 of owned versus borrowed from the library! The library is my biggest temptation—free books! I’ll talk more about my TBR at the end of this post (my grand finale, my most important goal of the year).

Authors genders and new vs rereads pie charts

Quite a few years back, looking at the books I was reading, I made a focused effort to start reading more women than men, since up to that point, the vast majority of books I was reading were written by men. This effort paid off for me, I discovered many new authors and genres I love and also found out that so many women write books I adore. At this point, I don’t even have to make any effort to read more women, it is just what I am drawn to naturally. And I also believe (but have no data to share on this) that the publishing industry has been shifting in the last few years, seeing the power of publishing and promoting more female authors, so it’s also not very hard to find and read women.

This past year also saw a small number of rereads of old favorites. The Six of Crows duology has become my new comfort read, and I read them again this year after finishing a watch of the second season of Shadow and Bone on Netflix (sadly not renewed for a third season because Netflix sucks). I also reread a few of my favorite Juliet Marillier books, and it ignited my desire to finish reading her full catalog (I have 5 books still left to read that I plan on getting to them in 2024).

Top authors: Brandon Sanderson, Juliet Marillier, Christina Lauren, and Mimi Matthews

2023 was the year of Sanderson: with a kickstarter delivering five new books, plus the release of the final Skyward book, and all the novellas I purchased on an effort of trying to finish reading his entire* catalog, 2023 was indeed the year of Sanderson, as I read 10 of his published works (5 novels, 4 novellas, 1 compilation of novellas written with Jaci Paterson). I expect he will not be the top author read in following years (unless I do a Stormlight Archive reread in 2024). Juliet Marillier is another fantasy author I really love and been reading consistently for a decade, and am close to finishing reading her full catalog, so she should be a repeat in this list again next year. Christina Lauren and Mimi Matthews are also authors I had several of her books in my kindle, so this year I wrapped up reading all of their books still in my TBR.

*I should qualify that I only wish to read his adults and YA novels, but will be skipping graphic novels and MG books.

Romance and Fantasy are again my top 2 genres! It’s the third year in a row, actually. Fun fact: as much as I love romance and fantasy, I do not enjoy “romantasy” (a name for this genre of romantic fantasy has been coined in 2023). That means a lot of the very trendy books of the last few years I have not read, or if I did, I hated them. Sorry Sarah J Mass fans, but I am just not an ACOTAR fan.

This year I was pretty excited about all the new-to-me authors I got to read. More than half of what I read this year were written by people I had never read before. Twenty-five of them were debut authors. Over 50 books I read this year were part of a series (and six were the last book in their respective series, which is always a good feeling when you can wrap it up). We already talked about rereads, but not about the 2 books I didn’t finish (that would make 138 books read this year if I had). I am not great at dropping a book I’m not enjoying, I always feel like I’m curious enough to keep going even if I am not having the time of my life, so the fact that two made the cut this year, just means I really really hated them. Maybe I need a reading goal of DNFing (DNF: did not finish) anything I’m not into after 50 pages.

Another favorite stat I like to track is how much I spend and save on books. It IS a bit skewed because not all books I read this year were bought this year, and not all books I bought this year I read this year, but what I am trying to do with this is figure out the cost of what I read this year (hope that made sense) 🤪. We saw, in a different graph earlier on this post, that I read a 50/50 split between owned books versus library books. But the actual cost of those was more like a 35/65 split. That’s because, besides not paying for half of the books I read this year (thank you library), I also try to buy books used and on sale when I can. If I had paid “full price” (I track full prices as the cost of the book on kindle at the time of starting to read the book, or the cost of one credit subscription to audible for audiobooks) I’d have spent about $1,600 dollars in books this year. Because of the reasons mentioned above, I only spent $661 dollars in books read this year. I saved almost $1,000 dollars by using the library, gift cards, and being a savvy shopper 🤣.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe, Emma Törzs: my favorite book of 2023. It’s what I like to call “light fantasy,” it is set in the real world in a contemporary timeline, it has a little bit of magic and spells, but it’s not a complicated world build. The book is about two sisters and their task to protect their family’s collection of magical books. Parts of it are set in Vermont, Antartica, and England. I couldn’t put it down once I started it.
Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld: the title says it all, it’s a romantic book and it’s funny. I really enjoyed the setting of this novel in the backstage of a SNL-like TV show, and the reversal of roles in the romance. It was sweet and surprisingly relatable. Sittenfeld knows how to write inner dialogue that sounds like my own brain sometimes.
The Wishing Game, Meg Shaffer: this was my second favorite book I read this year. It’s a sweet story, a Willy Wonka for adult readers. It’s perfect for adults who grew up reading adventure series as kids.
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt: another sweet story, I think this novel was a favorite to many this year because the story is so poignant and so well written. An older lady befriends an Octopus, and the Octopus changes her life and the lives of others, and it even solves a decades old mystery. Really, a must read.
The Green Journey, Jon Hassler: this was a birthday gift from a friend prior to a trip to Ireland we had planned for October. The story is about multiple characters from a small town, coming together for their own trip to Ireland. It’s an old book and the author has several stories set around that same small town and characters.
The Harp of Kings, Juliet Marillier: I devoured this book and the two follow ups in the series as fast as my library holds came. It’s a fantasy-world spy story, with students from a secretive warrior school who are called to infiltrate a king’s court and to solve a mystery of a missing harp. It was so much fun to read. *There are TW for this book for animal cruelty/death, and those are usually things I avoid in books, but I love JM too much, so I read it, even though some parts of it were difficult to read.
Babel, R.F. Kuang: This is a spectacular novel of fantasy. It’s a magic-school novel, but it’s nothing like Hogwarts. It grapples with the ethics and consequences of colonialism in a brilliant and gutting way. The ending was unexpected and the only way to really end it. I’ll be reading all books by R.F. Kuang in 2024.

In the year of 2020 I went on a big book buying binge (BBBB), mostly because I was home more and had a ton of extra time to read, but also because a lot of small bookshops were terrified of what the pandemic would mean to their businesses, and I wanted to help by supporting my favorites. The result was: I bought a LOT of books, and my already large TBR got out of control. Since 2020, I’ve made it my main goal every year to read more books from my collection, but not buying more than what I can read in a year. In 2023, I also tried to read all books bought in 2020 or before that were still lingering in the pile (I did it!), and then got almost all of the books purchased in 2021 read as well (have just 8 to go and it will be my priority to read in 2024). I did fail in my goal of getting my TBR under 50 books though. There were lots of releases I was excited for this year, and I bought more books than I had planned for. I will try to do better in 2024, but it’s not a huge deal to me, as, even though I buy a lot of books, I read even more books.

For a multi-year comparison, when I started to track my TBR in 2020, I had 120 books in it at the end of that year in my pile. Three years later, I only have 69 books waiting to be read on my pile. That means I almost—almost—halved the size of my TBR in three years of reading. My goal for 2024 is to try to keep my purchases and borrowing from the library to a minimum. so I can get that number even lower. I think to achieve this, I’ll have to stop looking at best-of published lists and other book related social media I follow. If I don’t know it’s out there, then I can’t borrow it from the library or buy new, right?

If you made it down here, thanks for reading and supporting my love of books.

And if you want to shop my shelves all in one neat spot, I got all 2023 and 2022 books listed on bookshop.org.

Map of Iceland with pins for all the places I visited in September 2022.

Falling in love with Iceland

June 18, 2023

Iceland may not have been at the top of my list of places to visit, but I fell in love with the country after our trip and haven't stopped dreaming about returning. In September 2022, fresh from the lockdown and pandemic, I wanted an easy and outdoorsy trip, and Iceland seemed like the perfect fit. So we spent 8 days in Western Iceland, with long travel days and slow days in between.

I wrote a 4-day itinerary for a travel blog (post coming at a later date) to share some of the best things we saw and some tips to make the most of it. I’ll leave the practical stuff to the travel blogs, but for mine, I just want to talk (and show) some of the reasons why I loved it.

1. It’s so moody

Pictured: Gunnuhver hot springs a couple kilometers south of Reykjavik.

We got all sorts of weather while we were there. We traveled in September, which is the tail end of summer in the northern hemisphere, and we knew we’d be getting some cold days (we packed a lot of waterproof clothing). And we got sunny days and cloudy days, but most of all, we got a lot of drizzle. Rain doesn’t phase me, and I love a dramatic sky and gray clouds moment on a trip. Admittedly, dipping into the Blue Lagoon with freezing winds and the coldest temperatures we got the whole trip wasn’t the most comfortable for the head and hands sticking above the water, but it LOOKED cool, okay? And I’d do it all again.

2. The cute horses

Pictured: An Iceland Horse I med wandering the Snæfellsjökull Peninsula

I was very determined to see an Icelandic horse up close, but we kept just seeing them while driving when there was no safe spots to park. Looking on Google Maps the night before, I saw there was a Berg Horse Farm place located just a few minutes from Kirkjufell, and we decided to try to drive there. We ended up not going all the way to the farm, as we found a herd eating in a pasture by a dirt road with no traffic halfway there. So we parked in a safe location off the road (never stop on the road! It's unsafe and very annoying for other drivers) and walked to see the horses up close; they are adorable.

Fun fact I learned (either from a guidebook or because my dad texted me about it, can’t remember which): horses cannot be imported into Iceland. You can export those cute little guys anywhere (there’s even an Icelandic Horse Farm an hour away from me here in Vermont), but no horses can go to Iceland. I think even if you export one, they can’t go back.

3. Waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls…

Pictured: Seljalandsfoss waterfall in Southern Icenland.

I feel like this one is self explanatory! So I’ll just share some pictures!

4. It’s so EASY to visit

Pictured: Kirkjufell

As someone with a very sedentary job and very sedentary hobbies, a day of hiking tough terrains to see a. beautiful vista at the end of it is not my idea of fun. I DO want to see the beautiful views though, I just don’t want to work that hard for them. In that way, Iceland over-delivers to people like me: a lot of its beautiful landscapes were so easy to get to, some we can even see from the road! Almost everywhere we went the parking was so close to the attractions, and the paths were wide and easy to walk in. I expected Iceland to be much more rugged (I packed my hiking shoes – yes, I do own a pair, surprisingly) but it was incredibly easy to get around and see a lot of things without having to get muddy and sweaty. And if you do like some adventure with your trip, at the time I visited, they had a volcano eruption you could hike to. But it was a two hour hike each way and our available day for it was very rainy, so instead we opted for staying in the car and driving around.

5. The Blue Lagoon IS all that

Pictured: the Blue Lagoon

Yes it is incredibly touristy and crowded. But it is also absolutely wonderful. The color of the water reminded me of our trip to Banff and all the glacier lakes we saw that we didn’t get to swim in, but this one was even better because it was warm and it came with complimentary mud masks and a beverage of your choice. I could have stayed there all day.

6. Reykjavik is magical

Pictured: Rainbow road and Hallgrímskirkja Cathedral

We based ourselves in Reykjavik for the entire trip, with the idea we’d do day trips from it to all places within a 3- to 4-hour drive, and take a break to explore the capital in between day trips. It was fantastic because we got to see a lot of the city in all sorts of weather, we walked a ton, and got to try some interesting restaurants. We tried the “world famous” hot dog, had some Omnom ice cream and chocolate, and sampling the local beer. My absolute favorite thing though, besides our long aimless walks through the city, was the Reykjavik cats. We saw quite a few cute cats just hanging around downtown.

7. The black-sand beaches

Pictured: Djúpalónssandur

All the landscapes were so striking, but none more than all the black sand beaches I saw. My husband and I agreed that our favorite thing in this trip was seeing Reynisfjara, the famous black sand beach in southern Iceland, because we had never seen anything like it. We went on the low tide and were able to walk and explore some quieter parts of the beach, to touch the rocks, to play with taking pictures of all the textures. And a couple of days later, we traveled northwest to the Snæfellsjökull Peninsula where we saw Djúpalónssandur, a fantastic black-sand beach with shipwrecks wreckage strewn around; and we also had a stop at Arnarstapi, with their many outcrops of rocks shaped by the ocean’s moods. It felt like being in another planet.

Thanks for indulging me in this trip down memory lane. I had an amazing time on this trip, and can’t wait to visit Iceland again, this time to explore the Eastern and Northern sides.

2022: My year Through Books

January 4, 2023

Hello and welcome to the third edition of what I read in a year told through infographics I spent too much time creating and even more time curating the spreadsheet where all this info gets recorded (yes, the lack of punctuation is intentional)… Nah, just kidding, I LOVE my spreadsheets and I live for those year-end graphs. It’s my own version of the Spotify Wrapped, but for books.

This year, I used book covers as my inspiration for the graphs I created. I hope you enjoy them. I’ll have sources for all images and covers at the end of this post.

Books read this year: 144. Goal: 110. 20% more books read than last year.

2022 was the year I read the most since I started tracking my reading habits in 2011. I read a whooping 144 books, and I only didn’t make it to 145 because number 145 would have been a treatise in philosophy, also known as Sophie’s World, a 400+ page book about a 15 year old girl in Norway receiving a course in philosophy through letters. So yeah, I didn’t manage to finish that one in 2022, but it will feature in my next year’s wrapped.

In 2021, I only read 120 books, so 144 is about 20% more than last year, and an average of 12 books read per month, 3 a week. And I know what you are asking… How does she do it? I usually read multiple books at once, so if one starts putting me to sleep (ahem, Sophie’s World), I can switch up to something that I’m in the mood for. Plus, reading digital books means that I am never without a book. Doctor is late by 45 minutes? No worries, I got a book!

Most of the books I read were pretty short, up to 500 pages. When I tackle something much longer, like this year’s reread of Mists of Avalon, it took me almost three months to finish.

The format of books I read are mostly digital nowadays. Ebooks and audiobooks account for 78% of the format of what I read. The reason for that is, as much as I love physical books, digital books are much easier to read for me. I love the control I have on ebooks to change the font size to accommodate for dry or tired eyes in the evening. Audiobooks make working out and doing chores a lot more bearable. And since most of what I read comes from the library (I’ll talk about this in a minute), the easiest way to borrow books is digitally.

I’m more of a fiction reader, but in the last few years I have discovered what kind of nonfiction I love—history and memoirs—and have been reading a lot more than I used to. The Lady from the Black Lagoon was one of my favorite reads this year, which I borrowed from the library and listened to (read by the author) while painting the ceiling of our living room and kitchen. Now, every time I look at the ceiling in our house I’m reminded of what part of the book I was listening to when I was painting that spot. It’s weird.

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog (thank you, Christy), you know I’ve set a goal to myself to read more of the books I already owned (the famous “TBR pile”) every year, and I’ll talk about it in this post soon, but as you can see by the graphic above, I still mostly read books that I borrow from the library. I cannot resist their temptation. It’s free! It’s right there on my phone! I can read it on my kindle as well! And have I mentioned… free? So, 58% of the books I read this year came from the library, with the other 42% were books I purchased this year or in a previous year.

My most read authors: The top two, Sarah MacLean, one of my favorite romance writers, and Brandon Sanderson who is a fantasy favorite, are authors I’m currently working on reading through all of their catalog, so it’s not surprising they are both top this year. Once I read all their books, they’ll probably just show up as often as they have releases! In the third spot of the most read was Christelle Dabos, a French author who wrote an interesting fantasy series called The Mirror Visitor, which I read in full in 2022.

I listened to 31 audiobooks, for a total of 295 hours, and read 40,573 pages this year

Here’s where data gets fun: I had an increase of 20% books read from last year, but only 9% more pages. That means I read more short books this year than I did last year! And, I didn’t include this in my post from last year, but I listened to about the same amount of hours of audiobooks (291 hours this year vs 295 last year), but I listened to 31 books this year vs 20 last year. I prioritized short audiobooks this year because they were all borrowed from the library where I only get 3 weeks to borrow them for.

The longest book I read this year was The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, which is basically three books bound in one hardcover volume, so you should give me a bit of credit for not counting this as having read three books (lol). And the shortest was by Brandon Sanderson, called Defending Elysium and is a short story that ties in with a series of his I’m currently reading.

I read so many genres, 33 according to my Storygraph (Storygraph is an app/tool to track reading like Goodreads, but with a lot better stats output), but Romance always gets the number one spot. There have been a resurgence of rom-com in literature in the past few years, and it’s hard to resist reading them all! Fantasy took a backseat, between all the rom-coms and contemporary and historical fiction I’ve been reading, I didn’t spend that much time in fantasyland.

Note: I would like to reiterate though, that even though I love Romance and Fantasy, I have not enjoyed the Fantasy Romance genre that has been incredibly popular the last few years (books from authors like Sarah J Maas and Jennifer Armentrout). Absolutely nothing wrong with the genre! It just didn’t click for me.

One of the reasons why I track my book reading so many different ways (see above mentions to Goodreads and Storygraph) is because I love data. But those apps don’t track the full range of things I want to know about my reading habits (and I know this sounds like “work” to many people, but I truly enjoy my spreadsheets and the last thing I do before sleep every day is updating all my apps and spreadsheets with the days’ numbers, because yes, I am a nerd). I created my own tracking with Google Sheets, and one of the things I track is how much my reading costs—and how much worse it could be, if I didn’t use the library! I’m not big on collecting books (I harbor no dreams of owning a library like Belle’s library in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) so owning books is not important to me so much as reading them. When I do shop. however, I tend to favor indie bookshops, so I pay more for books than if I bought them from Amazon. With all that in mind, the books I read this year cost me about $500, but my reading habit would have cost me three times that if I didn’t use the library. My savings this year were $1097. How does this compare to last year? My spending went up about 5%, but my savings were much higher: I saved 30% more than last year!

Some more fun facts, courtesy of Storygraph: of all the authors I read this year, 83 were new to me (or have never appeared in my lists since I started tracking in 2011). 62 books were part of a series, and of those, eight were the last book in their respective series (I’ve started many series this year, or read the latest releases of ongoing series, but only eight of them were the last book in their series). I reread three books and I think I could have done better, there’s still many favorites I want to read again. And only two books I gave up reading before finishing.

And last but not least… how am I doing with my goal of reading the books in my TBR (to-be-read pile)? Before we get into this year’s numbers, let me remind you were we were last year. I started 2021 with 101 books in my TBR and wanted to try to read 50% of them in 2021. By the end of that year, I had 96 books in my TBR because even though I read 60 books (beating my 50% goal), I also purchased 55 new ones. So, we’re working through it, but slowly, very very very slowly. I gave myself a higher target for 2022, the goal is to read at least 60% of my TBR, which would be about 58 books.

And we did much better! I read 60 TBR books in 2022, surpassing my 50% goal, and was much better about purchases, only acquiring 43 new books (a few of those were gifts). I’m entering 2023 with my most manageable TBR pile to date: 73 books! Good job!

Note: For full transparency, I had already pre-ordered 7 books coming out in 2023, so the current status of my TBR in 2023 is actually 80 books. The goal is to read 60 of them again, and to not buy more than 30, AND to make sure that all the books acquired before 2021 get read in 2023. Check this space next year to see how I did.

And here we are, at the end of my reading year in review post. Thanks for reading (skimming) and I hope you enjoyed it. For your effort, here’s my top 12 favorite books I read in 2022:

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson: a family saga and a mystery novel, about two siblings trying to piece together their family history and their relationship.
You Have a Match by Emma Lord: a YA about two twin sisters separated at birth, who meet at summer camp and it is NOT The Parent Trap.
True Biz by Sara Nović: The book opens with missing kids at a school for the Deaf, and from there Nović weaves a captivating cast of characters and sign language and civil rights.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green: It’s an alien invasion book, but here the aliens are nice and just want to help humanity connect. Told from the POVs of different friends as they work through the mystery of “the Carls.”
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green: Nonfiction essays about a variety of topics. Essays are from episodes of the podcast of the same name.
John Eyre by Mimi Matthews: it’s a retelling of two classic novels (one evident in the tile and the other is a spoiler) with gender swapped roles. The twist didn’t shock me, but I still really enjoyed what the author did with this novel.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel: This book is about time travel and a mystery that evolves through time. In the first half I had no idea what I was reading, but it was compelling. In the second half I got it and enjoyed it even more.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zévin: I feel like everyone has read this book this year, and the buzz is warranted. I could not put this story down, about two best friends and the video games they create.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead: this was a book club read, and I should warn you, I was the only one who loved it. But it was wildly popular when it came out, and it tells the incredible (fictitious) life of a woman pilot in the 20th century, and her mysterious disappearance while flying across the world. It includes a lot of circles.
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik: The final book in the Scholomance trilogy was a great way to wrap the story. The school of magic and the world building of this series really puts the "other” famous wizard school series to the curb. Warning: it has monsters and it is dark.
The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Heara: is the story of Millicent Patrick, the uncredited creator of the creature from the black lagoon, one of the most famous classic monster movies.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers: if you love Star Wars and want a book that feels like a warm hug, this is it. It tells the story of an interspecies crew hurtling across space on a mission.

To all of the above reads, one thing they have in common is that my life is richer for having read them. I’ve learned so much, and I was entertained a lot.

Sources:

And the gorgeous covers that inspired my infographics: