In 2022, I read 62 books. Although, I actually didn’t. I only read 49 books out of the 52 I was aiming for. But then, where do 13 books come from? Thin air? Ghosts? They actually come from everything I read last year. I’m just counting them differently.

Last May, I published a post where I tried for a month to track how many words I was reading instead of pages or books. The main reason was how much pressure I felt to finish books and keep on track with my Goodreads challenge. I found tracking by reading progress through books alone wasn’t fair. Not all books are made the same, so why should they be quantified the same? And so it began my word-tracking adventure.

At the time, I really enjoyed the experience and was renovating my motivation to read. So, I kept doing it for the rest of the year. Now, after 365 days, I read almost 5 000 000 words!… Yeah… One of the advantages of counting words is the absurdity of the numbers. They are so big they lose meaning. It didn’t matter if I read for an hour or five minutes. The numbers would always surpass the thousands mark and never felt too much or too little.

Another thing this method allowed me was to count the books I did not finish (DNF) and also the ones I put back into my TBR again. Not a single page went to waste. And while I don’t count the books I DNFed as read – for obvious reasons – they still matter for the final counting. So, when I say these numbers represent everything I read, I mean all the books I finished and the ones I didn’t. Every book I opened, and any short story I read, everything contributed to the count. And with all the calculations done by my trusty old friend spreadsheet, I read the equivalent of 62 books of 80 000 words each. Now, that is a beautiful number to see!

All the actual 49 books I read:

1. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (388 pages)(EN)
2. Nemesis by Brendan Reichs – Project Nemesis #1 (446 pages)(EN)
3. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (438 pages)(EN)
4. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware (338 pages)(EN)
5. Genesis by Brendan Reichs – Project Nemesis #2 (494 pages)(EN)
6. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown – Robert Langdon #3 (509 pages)(EN)
7. One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus – One of Us is Lying #1 (358 pages)(EN)
8. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (349 pages)(EN)
9. Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples (166 pages)(EN)
10. Deception by Teri Terry – Dark Matter #2 (403 pages)(EN)
11. Evolution by Teri Terry – Dark Matter #3 (452 pages)(EN)
12. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (720 pages)(EN)
13. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi – Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1 (172 pages)(PT)
14. The Girl in the Ice by Robert Bryndza – Detective Erika Foster #1 (343 pages)(PT)
15. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (251 pages)(PT)
16. The Bear Who Wouldn’t Leave by JH Moncrieff (87 pages)(PT)
17. Slay by Britney Morris (336 pages)(EN)
18. Saga Volume 2 by Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples (144 pages)(EN)
19. Our House is on Fire by Greta Thunberg (286 pages)(PT)
20. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #2 (439 pages)(EN)
21. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #3 (438 pages)(EN)
22. Chrysalis by Brendan Reichs – Project Nemesis #3 (400 pages)(EN)
23. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (309 pages)(PT)
24. Sarah Killian: Serial Killer (For Hire!) by Mark Sheldon – Sarah Killian #1 (173 pages)(EN)
25. Artemis by Andy Weir (305 pages)(PT)
26. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green – The Carls #1 (340 pages)(EN)
27. Fortuna Sworn by KJ Sutton – Fortuna Sworn #1 (300 pages)(EN)
28. The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor (307 pages)(PT)
29. A Pho Love Story by Loan Le (416 pages)(EN)
30. The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt – Jackelian #1 (498 pages)(PT)
31. Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan (322 pages)(EN)
32. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson – A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder #1 (433 pages)(EN)
33. The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan – Kirrinfief #1 (333 pages)(EN)
34. Love & Other Train Wrecks by Leah Konen (351 pages)(EN)
35. They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman (327 pages)(EN)
36. Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve – Mortal engines Quartet #1 (326 pages)(EN)
37. 1984 by George Orwell (294 pages)(EN+PT)
38. After Dark by Haruki Murakami (217 pages)(PT)
39. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff – The Illuminae Files #1 (599 pages)(PT)
40. The Friend by Dorothy Koomson (486 pages)(PT)
41. The Book of You by Claire Kendal (256 pages)(PT)
42. Gemina by Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff – The Illuminae Files #2 (659 pages)(EN)
43. The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide (136 pages)(EN)
44. Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes (359 pages)(PT)
45. Never by Jeanne Ryan (331 pages)(PT)
46. The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (262 pages)(PT)
47. Turning by Joy L Smith (352 pages)(EN)
48. Sinful by Katherine Hawthrone – Sinful Surrender Quartet (219 pages)(EN)
49. Freefall by Jessica Berry (458 pages)(EN)

A few stats of the year

I DNFed only 2 books: LA Confidential by James Ellroy and Where Secrets Lie by Eva V Gibson. In both, I didn’t care for the mysteries anymore and decided to do something better with my time. I also picked up a few more books to read but then put them back on my shelf to read another time. Like The Dispossessed by Ursula K le Guin, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Inferno by Dan Brown. Sometimes, a book needs more dedication than I want to give at the moment, and it’s best to save it for another occasion.

Of all the books, I reread 3, borrowed 6, and listened to 2: Fortuna Sworn and Mortal Engines (by the way, one thing I learned from this audiobook is how terrible the film adaptation is!). And, on the topic of audiobooks and borrowed ones, Spotify (books available vary depending on the country), Project Gutenberg (only old books in the public domain), and Riveted by Simon Teen (only YA titles published by Simon & Schuster) are a great way to get your hands on a free book and discover new favourites. Turning by Joy L Smith was one I read through Riveted, a debut that came out in 2022, and one I’ll be buying to fill it with all my annotations. I loved it, and it has less than a thousand reviews on Goodreads. So not only it’s a good way to read books for free but also to discover new titles.

Of 49 book, 20 had more than 400 pages, and 14 had less than 300, which mean that I actually read bigger books last year – if by big you consider anything over 400 pages. My most read genres were science-fiction and mystery. This is a great way to describe my taste in books. And I have an average star rating of 3,92, which isn’t bad, but I seriously need to start evaluating the books I spend my time on. I also had the challenge to read at least 50% of the books I bought, and since I went on a book-buying ban in June, I succeeded… barely. But I did!

The biggest book I read last year was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and I feel like I should receive some kind of award for taking on such a big book. At least more than just having a plus one on my Goodreads Reading challenge. It took me two months to finish that book. I would like for it to be worth three regular books, please!

The year in retrospect

Since I finished A Little Life, I’ve realised I want to read bigger books. I like the promise of a great adventure, something so enormous and detailed it needs pages and pages to be told. Although in the back of my mind, I also have a little voice saying it will take me forever to read big books. And not updating my Goodreads challenge for that long leaves me uneasy. After such a long commitment, it’s demoralising to see that I only read one book in a month. All because Goodreads doesn’t take into consideration the size of the book.

And doing this silly thing of counting words helps me to tackle those big books. It quantifies my commitment to a story. In a way, it’s holding my hand and giving me a pat on the back, encouraging me to keep going. And so, I’ll say I read 62 books in 2022, even if they aren’t from cover to cover. Looking at this number makes me feel proud, accomplished and motivated, and it makes all the time I invested reading worth it, whether it was a big book or a small one. It’s possible to go on a tangent here that reading should be about quality and not quantity, but that will have to be a conversation for another time. Right now, I want to enjoy this feeling and take the most out of it. And if 2023 is the last year I count words because I find that it’s actually stupid, then so be it. As a reader, I’m open to doing the stupidest things to keep myself as engaged and passionate about reading as I want.

Therefore, I’ll continue this year to track my reading through words. It’s working wonderfully for me. I find it so much fun to add my reading every day. I won’t say this is the best method or that reading should be tracked. I enjoy doing it, and this is a way I found to better my relationship with reading. Also, I’m even changing the format of my reviews to give a more accurate representation of the commitment each book represents.

And so, this year, I’m hoping for loads of big books. To take on great and long adventures. To commit to more extraordinary stories. And being armed with a spreadsheet to fairly score my reading, it’s all the willpower I need to conquer my reading year once more.