I did not expect to read that many books in 2024. But if I had kept going and had watched less in Instagram, I probably would have cleared a hundred books. Personally, I don’t think this should be anybody’s goal as I think that you should read deeply when you could, and spend more time outside with friends and trying out something new, like bouldering, parasailing, learning a new language or chatting up strangers in the street.
But I’m not made like that and I’m too comfortable around books. And fast approaching forty, I still debate whether my obsession with reading is a good thing or a not so good thing, but I refuse to believe that it is a bad thing. But all in all, it has been a good year for reading, and I’ve noticed that this is the same for many people in social media this year. In Malaysia, where I live, I can see this reading trend catching on like wildfire, where secondhand bookshops are popping out in every second suburb. And this is definitely a good thing. I see more readers in public places now and it’s refreshing to see.
In any case, here’s some interesting stats from last year:
- Books read — 94 books
- Pages read — about 32,555 if I base it off Goodreads
- Books written by women — 31 books (32%)
- Books written by authors of colour — 17 books (18%)
- Books written by author not born in USA or Great Britain — 23 books (24%)
- Comparison between fiction and non-fiction read — 78 fiction vs 16 non-fiction
It is surprising when I’m tallying this up in my spreadsheet (yes, I am one of those people), that there is as much good as there is not so good in this list. For a start, out of any year in my reading life, I have the highest proportion of women authors compared to male authors at just under a third. And for the life of me, I really can’t remember whether it was intentional from the beginning of the year or not. But I’ll take it.
Now for the not so good. One thing I realised when I plotted the country of origin of the authors I read this year was that a fair chunk were born in America or Britain. This skews the distribution, as only one quarter of the books I read this year were from authors of countries other than the big two. I suppose this reflects the availability of books from the pens of those who were born American or British, but this is a stark reminder that I have not had any Russian authors to add to the list, and to be fair, not enough of the French and German either. But we should look further than the European continent and as such, this will be a goal to improve on this year.
In terms of the spread of non-fiction and non-fiction, this largely remained the same as previous years. Ideally, the proportion of the non-fiction books I read should be closer to a third, but it remains under one-fifth of my total. This is pretty fucking abysmal and I’ve got no reason as to why I’m not reading non-fiction, as I also do enjoy non-fiction immensely.
But the formats of the books I’ve read had also been colourful. I’ve read four plays (three of them by old mate Will Shakespeare), three books of short stories, two epics, and a handful young adult books I couldn’t care less about counting. Although the genres of the novels have been diverse, I noticed a pattern in which I’m reading more and more books from this century. Maybe I’ve been chasing more books in book lists a little bit too hard.
Having said that, I’ve put to bed a few monkeys off my back: books that’s always been nagging me to be read, but I’ve never found or never picked up. It’s a massive relief to finally getting some of the big names checked off the list: Inferno, Canterbury Tales, Flowers for Algernon, 1Q84, The Portrait of a Lady. Getting them reviewed and posted is a stupidly cathartic experience. Go figure.
It’s also been a year where I’ve said goodbye to old mate Sherlock Holmes as I completed reading the last of Doyle’s work for the drugged up detective, and to an extent, another drugged up detective in Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe. At least I’ve cleaned up the more popular Marlowe novels for now. I’ve also torched through the big Dickens novels after having read Nicholas Nickleby, even though Barnaby Rudge, Edwin Drood and the Christmas books still weighs heavy in the gutters. Ah shite I forgot about his non-fiction shit as well. You’re never done with Dickens.
Filling in the gaps for next year
2024 has been kinda white. This is the cost of picking up books haphazardly and not really minding what’s next. Diversity is good and we should read books of different varieties written by authors of even more colourful variety. So in 2025, I will be keeping this in mind. So these are the handful of goals I’ll be committing to for the remainder of the year.
Reading less books, for reals
Instead of chasing the elusive 100, I recognised that I should probably read less for once and max out my reading to less than 70 books. This is already a substantial amount, and I will be happy with 50 but I won’t have a minimum. There are other areas of focus this year aside from reading — getting my social life back on track, get better at the new things I’m trying out like hitting the shit out of golf balls and climbing walls like Spider-man. I will also still run like a mad cunt trying to chase Kipchoge. Thus, reading will need to take a back foot this year.
Finish up some more of the big books and cleaning up the anti-library
If nothing else, I want to check off other unicorns off the list that’s been nagging me for years, including: at least one more book of the Divine Comedy (both would be a stretch goal), Gravity’s Rainbow, Paradise Lost and a couple of popular King books such as Carrie and Misery. But I really need to finish the books that’s blocking my broken TV: my quickly piling TBR books. Fuck me I gotta stop buying more books.
Read more authors of different backgrounds
The data is in for 2024 and it’s fucking pathetic. When only a quarter of the author you read are born in countries other than England and USA, then you need to make adjustments. So my goal in 2025 is to bring this number closer to half. I’ll take forty something percent, but looking at my big pile of TBR, it looks pretty fucking white: Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, more Shakespeare. I gotta do better here regardless.
Write more about reading
I’ve been reading a long time now, but I seldom reflect on the reasons why, what benefit is of me (and therefore others) and how impactful books can be for us. Reading, I believe, is and always will be a special experience and aspects of it is not tangible, but we must try our best to figure out what that substance is behind the ink on the page. I’ve always written these reviews to explore books to make sense of them to the best of my ability, but I need to take this a step further and discuss reading itself as opposed to individual books.
