2022 was a looong year, with a lot of focus on life rather than my hobbies which was unfortunate but these things happen. Whilst I knew this, and adapted accordingly with my Goodreads reading challenge and the time taken to read – I didn’t quite manage to let my purchasing habits know.
Books Purchased in 2022
In 2022 I purchased 99 books. This number includes pre-orders, impulse purchases when away, second hand purchases and also includes books like art books, comics etc. So whilst not all 99 were full priced novels, it definitely leaves a dent in the bank account and takes up space on the shelves and TBR pile.
I also want to call out that one of the issues I have is also purchasing a whole series of books at once, and then because of mood reading I don’t binge the whole series. I did this with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels, which is like 13 books. I did a similar thing with Kate Brian’s Private and Privilege Series because I wanted to re-read, but the ones I did read were ones I already had on my shelves and then New Year happened before I got to the ones I’d purchased. So about 30 of this number are from 2 authors.
Books Read in 2022
Of the 99 books purchased, my spreadsheet is telling me I only read 22 of these books. So it’s a low 20% success rate at reading what I’ve been spending my money on. I feel like best case scenario would this being a 95-100% rate instead, but a more realistic view would be that I should be aiming towards the 70% mark going forward, with exceptions for any books like cookbooks or art books which you can kind of flip through but don’t read cover to cover.
My actual reading habits last year were also not the same as usual as I read 54 books. This is lower than previous years, and is about 1 book per week which isn’t always accurate to my life. Sometimes I read multiple books a week, sometimes this narrows down to 0.
The Plan
As I mentioned in my 2023 Reading Goals post, one of my goals is to start reading books when I purchase them and only purchase if I know I’m going to start reading it immediately. The point of this is so that I purchase with intention, and for actual want or need rather than binge purchasing or emotional retail therapy.
Another part of my 2023 plan is that I need to read more physical books, especially if I want to keep buying them. Last year was a lot of kindle reading – especially at night as I prefer my kindle light to fall asleep with. It’s probably not healthy for my sleeping to this, and it’s not helping reduce my owned TBR pile either. I need to get a better balance between physical and ebook.
And then as you can probably imagine, I need to stop purchasing whole series of books. I can ALWAYS order the next book when I need it instead of filling my shelves with big series that I haven’t finished. My only exception to this rule is if there’s good deals on box sets at places like The Works (like when I got the Witcher series or LOTR collections 👀).
