Red-Haired Ash Reads

Hello! Can you believe it’s 2024 already! It feels like its still 2020 and I don’t know where the last few years have gone. This year’s wrap up is going to look a bit different from previous wrap ups. I was never really happy with my previous wrap ups so I am still tweaking it to my liking, but I will get there eventually. This years wrap up with have a recap of my 2023 goals, book stats and also some of my favorite movies because I tracked what I watched this year.

2023 Goals Revisit

To start with lets revisit my 2023 goals and see how they went.

1. Read 500 books – done
2. Netgalley to 95% (started at 90%) – Done again. I hit this goal in September/October I think.
3. Post more book I enjoy to Instagram – I think I succeeded at this. I posted at least three times each month.
4. Get 600 blog followers (started at 557) – I hit my goal of 600 at the end of November so I am happy!
5. Read my backlog and hit 50% on my StoryGraph tracker (started at 26% of 488 books) – I read 51% of my backlog after two years. I created a new reading challenge tracker for StoryGraph that will start for 2024 and go to 2025 so I hope to get it under 100 in that time frame.
6. Only buy books that I know I want to read or that I have read and are on sale. – I actually succeeded in this and I will be continuing this for 2024.

Now lets get into my 2023 reading year!

2023 Reading Stats

I read 566 books this year! And for once keep my rereads relatively low, which is surprising since I usually reread a lot. Also my Goodreads challenge is not accurate because some of the books were not on Goodreads.

• New books: 434
• Re-reads: 134

Pages

• 139,198 pages

Listening time

This year was not a great audio year for me. The past three years I really got into audiobooks but this year was hard and I struggled with audio so I only listened to 22 audiobooks. Surprisingly, in December though I listened to 121 hours alone so I found some end of the year mojo.

• 272 hours

New Favorite Authors

This year I read a total of 198 new authors (thank you StoryGraph for that stat) which is probably more than any other year. I really tried this year to find new authors and in doing so, found a lot of new favorite authors. Here are my new favorites (which you will see in the next chart to):

• Kiki Clark
• Lily Mayne
• Etta Pierce
• Kimberly Lemming

Most Read Authors:

As you can see from this chart my most read author this year was Eiichiro Oda. I read 106 volumes of One Piece this year. I have been a fan of One Piece since it aired on Toonami in 1999 and have watched all the anime, and am still watching the anime to this day, but had never read the manga so this year I decided to read it all and it was wonderful. I will defiantly be keeping up with it.

My next most read authors were Hailey Turner, Kiki Clark, Anna Hackett, Hirohiko Araki, and Annabeth Albert. As you can see I read a lot of series from authors so I had quite a few repeat authors on this list.

Most Read Genres:

For once my most read genre was not paranormal romance. This year it was LGBTQIA+ books, which is wonderful. I feel like this year was the year of queer for me and it was so much fun and I found so many wonderful books because of it.

Favorite Movies I watched this year:

This year was the first year I tracked the movies I watched so I figured I would add this since this is just a yearly wrap up and doesn’t have to be limited to books. My favorite movies this year were:

1. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
2. Renfield
3. Scream VI
4. Godzilla Minus One
5. Barbie
6. Bullet Train
7. Nope
8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
9. Bottoms
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

How did your 2023 go? Also did you enjoy any of these movies?