My 2024 in Books

January 3, 2025

I didn’t quite meet my 2024 reading challenge goal of 107 books (one more than I read in 2023), but I read some very challenging books, so I mostly feel okay about it. For the past couple of years, I have been using StoryGraph as well as Goodreads. I like to see the different types of data – but discrepancies in the shared data do provide a nice reminder that it’s all in good fun. In any case, for my own amusement (and yours, should you actually enjoy this sort of thing) here’s a look at how much of what kind of reading I did in 2024. I’d love to hear from you if you read some of the same things.

How Much Did I Read?

According to Goodreads, I read 36,922 pages across 99 books in 2024.

According to StoryGraph, I read 26,443 pages across 94 books in 2024.

I think Goodreads has a more accurate count of the number of books I read – I still sometimes forget to log a completed book on StoryGraph, and I’m not quite OCD enough to go back and reconcile my year end list. My page count is way off this year, thanks to two very long Kindle books. The first of these is Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” which Goodreads counted as 364 pages and StoryGraph counted as 859 pages. I believe StoryGraph is much closer to the truth. The other digital brick was “The Works of Jules Verne” that I finished in December. That’s the complete works, thank you very much, and it really was all of the 9,278 pages Goodreads claims it is. But I started reading it about a decade ago and only read about 1000 pages of it this year.

Fortunately, Jules Vern was one of the books I did not log in StoryGraph before it generated my year-end report, so their estimate of my average book length as 283 pages is probably accurate. So is this summary of monthly reading.

Popularity

Apparently, StoryGraph and Goodreads users have different reading habits.

As usual, my reading is a little out of sync with the zeitgeist. The most-read by others book on my Goodreads list is Laurie Halse Anderson’s YA classic “Speak,” published in 1999, while StoryGraph readers preferred “The Poppy War,” which wasn’t one of my favorites. Unsurprisingly, nobody else read the English translation of Fernao Lopes’ 15th century biography of the 14th-century Portuguese King Pedro and it’s kind of weird that anyone else picked up a 20-year-old vegetarian nutrition book. Zhang Er’s hard-to-find book of poetry, “First Mountain,” had fewer than a dozen ratings across both platforms, but on both, it was the highest-rated book I read.

Type of Reading

StoryGraph provides some fun stats that Goodreads doesn’t.

Once among my most-read genres, manga and graphic novels combined only totaled 15 books, but I think I forgot to record some rereads. Speaking of rereads, according to StoryGraph: