July/Mid-Year Wrap-Up

I've already done a July reading update that covers most of what I read in July, but I did squeeze in a couple more books after finishing the dreaded ACOMAF, so I thought I might as well discuss those and then do sort of a late mid-year wrap-up of my current reading stats.

After finishing ACOMAF, I read The Harbors of the Sun, and then I picked up Star Splitter by Matthew J. Kirby. 

Crash-landed on a desolate planet lightyears from Earth, sixteen-year-old Jessica Mathers must unravel the mystery of the destruction all around her--and the questionable intentions of a familiar stranger.

I really enjoyed Star Splitter. It's a tense young adult sci-fi survival/mystery story that poses some interesting philosophical questions, and it was a pretty quick read. I want to do a full review of it at some point, so I'll leave it at that for now.

And then I finished out August by rereading Fugitive Telemetry. I didn't want it to get jealous of the other Murderbot novellas because it's only been read twice, so obviously I had to read it a third time.

Obviously.

Anyway, onto the mid-year wrap-up.

This post is basically a shameless excuse to show off my various graphs, starting with this totally normal breakdown of how many new authors I've read this year, versus how many repeat authors I've read, versus...um...Martha Wells...whose books for some reason take up almost 30% of this pie chart....

How did that happen?

In the first six months of the year, I read 13 Martha Wells books, and then in July I reread 5 installments of the Murderbot Diaries (for the second time this year) and finished the Raksura series by reading the Harbors of the Sun. So that's a total of 19 Martha Wells books read so far, out of 64 books total. 

Listen, I have a post titled "I'm in my Martha Wells era" in my drafts for a reason. 

Moving on to genre. 

 

Fantasy is pretty much always my most-read genre, so this isn't a surprising breakdown. The fact that about a third of the books I've read are sci-fi is higher than normal, but you do also have to remember that like 10 of those are specifically Murderbot. But that does still mean I've read 11 non-Murderbot sci-fi books this year! I don't hate those numbers at all.

I don't know how readable this chart is, but it's basically comparing how many books I've read in each month of the past two and a half years. The dotted lines are the pages, but I had to rely on Goodreads' estimation of page count, which doesn't take into account books read as audiobooks, so it's probably a little off. I think you can still get a general idea of the vibe here.

The turquoise-y teal line on this chart is 2022, and the pink shaded line is 2023. Overall, I'm reading less in 2023 than I was in 2022, but I'm fine with that. I'm curious to see if November/December will continue to be low reading months this year. The last couple of years have had me kind of scramble to read a bunch of books in August/September for job reasons, and then I tend to fall off during the holiday months because work is busy and holidays are going on.

Overall I think my reading year is going alright. In the next half of the year, I think I'd like to read more authors that are new to me and maybe even a little nonfiction, but I'm pretty content with the numbers otherwise.