Roof Beam Reader (original) (raw)

Hello, Stranger!

As a reminder, please subscribe to my new blog, The Contemplative Reading Project. I share my reading updates there every 7-10 days & will be active only on that account moving forward (except for mid-year and year-end summary posts I’ll continue to share here.)

Now that we’re heading into the second half of 2024, I thought I’d share a bit about my reading so far.

General Goals

My reading goal for this year is set at 104 books, and as you’ll see from the StoryGraph chart below, I’m way ahead of schedule. That said, this takes into account manga, which is super short and fast reading, and I’ve read 55 of those books so far this year. If we eliminate manga from the equation, I’m only about 35% of the way to goal, which is not so great. (So, let’s keep counting manga toward my progress!)

Moods

We can get a little deeper into the types of reading I’m doing if we look at the “mood,” as designated by me and other readers on StoryGraph. It looks like the majority of this year’s reads so far fall into the emotional, lighthearted, and adventurous categories, with reflective and funny rounding out the top five. I’m going to assume that most of those (certainly lighthearted, adventurous, and funny), are heavily influenced by my manga reading, with emotional and reflective coming from literary fiction, Buddhism, and poetry.

Pace and Length

I’m not at all surprised that 70% of my reading these first six months came in under 300 pages. What does surprise me, though, is that I’ve read some real chunksters of 500 or more pages. Six of them, in fact! I had forgotten how long TJ Klune’s Ravensong is, both because I read it way back in January but also because it’s so good that I flew through it. Crime and Punishment doesn’t surprise me, nor does my recent read of Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go. I had forgotten about Nathan Hill’s Wellness, though, which was over 600 pages! (That one was pretty slow-going for me.) I’m also a bit surprised that most of my books are considered “medium” pace, since I feel like manga generally moves quickly.

Genres and Favorites

Below is a helpful and easy little breakdown of the genres I’ve been reading. The awesome thing about StoryGraph, besides simply providing these constantly updated charts and graphs, is that they are interactive; so, I can click on a category in any of these reports and find the books that apply to it. This has been helpful in reviewing my ratings, for example, to remind myself of some truly stellar reads thus far this year.

What are my favorites, you ask? Well, of all the books I’ve read so far this year, I’ve rated 10 of them 5 out of 5 (that’s 11% of my reads!) Five of those are manga, which I’m going to exclude except to say that I really enjoyed one particular manga series and rated multiple volumes of it with a perfect score. What are the others?

I also want to provide a few honorable mentions for books I rated 4.75 out of 5.0. They’re nearly perfect and I continue to think about all of them, and will likely re-read them, which means I can highly recommend each one: Dharma Talk: Poems by John Brehm; In Memoriam by Alice Winn; In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson.

Final Word

According to StoryGraph, I’ve read 91 books and 24,053 pages so far this year. I don’t anticipate the second half of the year being as productive, especially since my manga-reading has cooled down, but who knows? I’m pleased that about 10% of my reads have been so stellar that I could give them a perfect score, and that quite a few others nearly earned that coveted 5 out of 5 as well.

Overall, it’s been a really fantastic reading year so far, and I’ve been especially enjoying my slow/reflective reading with The Contemplative Reading Project. This month, we’re reading Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon!

If you’d like to keep up with my thoughts on books & more, please subscribe to my new project!