Buckle up, folks, this is a long book blog in review 2024 post (just like last year). Rather than break everything up into separate posts, I prefer to get everything out at once. To help you digest it, feel free to either read the whole thing or use the Table of Contents to navigate to sections of interest. In this book blog in review 2024 post, I recap whether I accomplished my bookish goals. I also discuss my blog statistics as well as my reading statistics.

Overall, I’m super pleased with my reading and blog statistics in 2024. It was not an easy year for me. In fact, it was probably the hardest year of my life. Reading and blogging were two things I continued to turn to as a way to remain somewhat grounded and not despair all of the time. Several times I considered going on a blogging hiatus, but I just felt I needed this distraction, so I kept at it. So, thank you all for your continued interaction with my little space on the internet!

Bookish Goals for 2024 Wrap-Up

I listed by 2024 bookish goals in a dedicated post back in January. Here’s how I did on them:

• Read 52 books: COMPLETED. I successfully completed this one by a longshot! I read 114 books.
• Track by reading: COMPLETED. Again, I used one of Kal’s Book Blogger/Reader Spreadsheet Template. This year I upgraded to the Elite version so I could track subgenres and author identity. I tweaked it a little to better suit my needs. I love this spreadsheet.
• Track my spending: COMPLETED. This is another feature of Kal’s spreadsheet, but of course you can do it on your own. I lasted all the way until September doing this before I got swamped. If I have time in January I might fill in the rest.
• #BeattheBacklog: FAILED. Overall, I failed at this. I did better in 2024 than in 2023, though, and unhauled some books because of it. But I could do better.
• Series Completion Challenge: SUCCESS. I made up this challenge to motivate myself to finish series I’d already started. While I didn’t fully complete it, I finished most of the series in my 2024 list. I started out wanting to read 14 books in these series and read 8. That’s over 50%, technically!
• Request less ARCs: SUCCESS. I feel I did a good job at this. Or, rather, I didn’t request ARCs willy nilly and instead requested ones that really grabbed my interest. Still, I had a lot of 2024 ARCs (30) and somehow managed to read (or DNF) 28 of them. Looking back at everything, I feel pretty good about that.
• Increase blog followers: SUCCESS. My goal in 2024 was to reach 200 blog followers. And it happened! In fact, more than 200 lovely people follow my li’l ol’ blog. Thank you!

Blog Blog Statistics for 2024

Summary Statistics

These summary statistics are from the Jetpack plugin for WordPress. I like to show these numbers to bring expectations into perspective, not as a humble brag. Keep in mind that I have had this blog for nearly four years (in March), so my statistics might look different than a blog that’s only a year old.

I implemented search engine optimization (SEO) in the last quarter of 2022. (Learn more about SEO here.) So 2023 had a lot of growth as did 2024. I was stunned then and I remain stunned now. Thanks to SEO I had about triple the number of views and visitors from 2023 to 2024. And that’s despite posting less in 2024 compared to 2023. My interactions (likes and comments) were about the same as last year, thanks to some loyal and friendly followers.

Statistic	2021	2022	2023	2024
Total Posts	73	196	184	155
Total Views	1,005	8,836	35,842	91,104
Visitors	400	3,398	22,768	70,325
Likes	116	1,426	2,416	2,201
Comments	26	468	1,297	1,323

Traffic Sources

Once again, SEO continued to make a huge difference in the discoverability of my content. Search engines as a traffic source increased by over 3.5 times. It’s a shame to see the Twitter drop off, which is a combination of an algorithm that shunned anything with links in it and me leaving the site. Hopefully BlueSky will become a top five traffic source in 2025. Also, shout out to John at Tales From Absurdia, whose site directs readers here, presumably because of this post.

Traffic Source	2021	2022	2023	2024
Search Engines	30	417	18,183	66,939
Twitter	269	1,800	2,748	1,683
WordPress.com Reader	63	1,099	1,596	1,196
talesfromabsurdia.com	—	—	614	558
WordPress Android app	—	6	311	479

Most Read Posts

In 2024 my top five most-read posts, according to WP stats, are:

1. Book Review: Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Maehrer: 10,236 views
2. Arthurian Retellings Reading List: 8,108 views
3. Book Review: Fall of Ruin and Wrath by Jennifer Armentrout: 7,002 views
4. ARC Review: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig: 3,712 views
5. Book Review: The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake: 3,641 views

It’s nice to see that most of my top-viewed posts are book reviews! That trend continues even through the top 10 most-viewed posts. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, though, that most of my top-viewed posts are book reviews. Those are the type of posts I most often write!

Reading Statistics for 2024

While I use The Storygraph to track my reading on an app, I also really like Reader Voracious’s Ultimate Book Blogger / Reader Spreadsheet Template. In fact, I actually used the charts from the Reader Spreadsheet Template for my mid-year reading statistics update. So I plan to continue using the spreadsheet charts rather than The Storygraph. I find them easier to format to the same size for a blog post.

Ratings

My average rating in 2024 was 3.90, which is about the same as 2023 (3.96). I doled out 4-star ratings the most, which also didn’t change from 2023. Overall, most of my ratings are positive ones with a handful of 3-star or lower ratings. I like to think this means I know what I like to read.

Five-Star Reads

My five-star reads in 2024 were:

• HOUSE OF SKY AND BREATH by Sarah J. Maas
• NOT ANOTHER LOVE SONG by Julie Soto
• FINDING ME by Viola Davis
• LESLIE F*CKING JONES by Leslie Jones
• ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler
• THE HURRICANE WARS by Thea Guanzon
• A COURT OF FROST AND STARLIGHT by Sarah J. Maas

Reading Format and Book Length

My reading formats basically had the same splits as 2023. In 2024 I read mostly e-books (47%), followed by print books (32%), and closed out with audiobooks (21%).

Once again I read a large percentage of books that had less than 300 pages. This is because I continued to judge for the SFINCS contest, which focuses on novellas. The book length splits are about the same as 2023, with slightly smaller percentage of 500+ page books read.

Reading by Genre

In 2023 I used The Storygraph’s genres/moods breakdown. But this time I’m using the genre and subgenre charts in Reader Voracious’s template. To no one’s surprise, most of my reads were fantasy (46.3%). At a distance second was nonfiction (16.7%), which consisted mostly of the memoir (13.8%) subgenre. I also realized I read more paranormal fantasy (13.8%) than I expected, but I suspect that might have to do with the type of SFINCS novellas I had to read. Paranormal fantasy is not something I gravitate to, though I’m not averse to reading it.

Reading by Release Date

I didn’t officially track this in 2023, so this is a first-time statistic for me. I’m actually surprised that I read as many backlists as I did (48.6%). The majority of my reads were still new releases (which includes ARCs). But a nearly 50% backlist rate is great! Now, I need to make sure in 2025 that a lot of my backlist reads are from my own shelves! 😉

While I don’t have a chart for this, I received 30 ARCs for books with 2024 publish dates and read 28 of them! That’s a 93% completion rate! I’m not saying I read them all on time, but I’m still proud of myself. I chalk it up to really holding myself back from requesting everything that looked somewhat interesting. I know I’m not a super fast reader, so only requesting books that really caught my interest helped keep my “workload” down.

Publisher Type

I’m not surprised that most of my reads are from the Big 5 publishers. Honestly, the SFINCS is the major reason I have as many self-published books on here as I do.

Reading by Identity

As I mentioned in my mid-year statistics post, I divided reading by identity into three main categories: racial identities, gender, and whether there is an LGBTQ+ component. The latter doesn’t take into account whether the author identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community. I modified these categories from Kal’s original spreadsheet. (And yes, I know I put the parentheses around the wrong “A” for “AAPI.” My point was to include both Asians and Asian Americans within the AAPI identity.) The dark blue sliver in “Reading by Author Identity” is for “Hispanic.”

Obviously, I read majority White authors here, though about 36% of my reads were written by authors who identify as other races. I’d really like to read more MENA/Jewish authors…that’s definitely a weak spot in my reading diversity.

Most of the books I read were by female authors, which is not a surprise to me. I only read one book with a nonbinary author, which accounted for a measly 0.8% of my reads. About 21% of my reads had LGBTQ+ characters, whether it’s the main character(s) or friends of the MC.

And that’s that for my book blog in review 2024. Feel free to share yours in the comments!