Bookish Quarter in Pie Charts 1/2023

Hi and welcome to FromBelgiumWithBookLove!

This is my fourth year of keeping a spreadsheet to keep track of my reading in a more organised fashion than Goodreads offers, and once again I’ve tweaked it a little to find out a little more. I’m not a numbers person, never have been, but I do like stats and pie charts so once again I’m going to have a look at my bookish year through pie charts, and see what they might reveal about me as a reader, or how I might have evolved since I first started keeping track.

This is what my bookish January, February and March look like in pie charts:

First of all: format. My digital reading has increased again, and I have been listening a bit more to audiobooks. With very few paper proofs coming in and me watching my book budget, these percentages are no surprise. I had a look back at the first quarter of 2021, which was the first time I made a format pie chart, and my eBook percentage then was 42%. That means a whopping 20% increase of my digital reading.

I have been trying to diversify my reading, finding I’m really enjoying historical fiction, so I started keeping track of When I was reading. I do love the sight of this pie, with less than half of what I read set in the present. Apparently, I read quite a lot of non-fiction (NA) as well, and a whole lot of books set in the future.

I was equally excited to find out Where I was reading. The US and England are fighting for the top spot again, but I do love that almost half of what I read was set in other countries.

This year, I decided to keep track of US states as well. I would love to visit all the states this year, not sure if I’ll be able to but I do have a nice collection here already. If you have any recommendations, do let me know!

And for those of you who like maps:

Looking at Source, where my books came from, I’m obviously still getting my money’s worth from my Scribd subscription. I also signed up for a Kindle Unlimited subscription at a discount and I tried to make the most of that.

Looking at Genre, I notice a bit of a shift. I still read a lot of thrillers but I clearly craved historical fiction and non-fiction more than last quarter, and fantasy and horror less.

The difference between new-to-me and known-to-me Authors has balanced out again.

Last year I tried to read as much from my backlog TBR as I could (inspired by Lisa @ OwlBeSatReading), so I looked at when I bought the books I read, or, in case of books read through Scribd, when I added them to my wishlist. I did not #BeatTheBacklog, I mostly said #BallsToTheBacklog, so I decided to try again this year… Well, I might beat the backlog eventually, but last quarter, I clearly did not 🙈

In terms of standalones, series or duologies, I seem to have read many more standalones than in previous quarters.

In terms of books in their original language vs books in translation, I’m happy that I did get a few translations in, even if they’re a rather small percentage of what I read.

I hardly ever reread books. Not because I don’t want to, but because my Mount TBR shoots daggers at me whenever I do 😂 Still I started keeping track of rereads, in the hopes of sort of motivating myself to reread more. This is not a spectacular percentage, but it could be worse, I guess.

Well that’s it for today, if you made it here thanks for joining me and sticking it out 😄 Do you keep track of your reading, would your pie charts look anything like mine or not at all? Let me know below!