2013 in books by the numbers

One word best sums up my reading in 2013 — ebooks. Two-thirds of the books I read this year were ebooks, up from under 50 percent the year before. In fact, even though I read 30 fewer books in 2013, I read seven more ebooks than in 2012. And although I read more than 41,000 pages in 2013, that’s some 10,000 (that’s right, five digits) less than in 2012. I’ve no clue for the cause of the decline as I would have guessed I’d read about as much this year as last. In fact, the number of books and pages are even less than in 2011.

The counts don’t include graphic novels (I read a handful) or audiobooks. Just more than half the books I read were nonfiction, also a change from the prior two years. In that area, nearly two-thirds of the books were history or autobiographies, memoirs or biographies. Here’s a breakdown of how the year shaped up:

Books Read: 132

Pages Read: 41,560

• Average Pages per Book: 314.85
• Average Pages per Day: 114.8
• Average Number of Days per Book: 2.76/li>
• Longest Books: 624 pages (Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does by Tomek Jankowski and Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith)
• Shortest Books: 98 pages (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens and North of Twelfth Street: The Changing Face of Sioux Falls Neighborhoods by Tom Dempster and Gary Olson)

Fiction: 60 (45.5 percent)

• Translated Works: 20 (17 fiction and three nonfiction)
• Languages: German (7), Russian (4), Albanian (2), French (2), Spanish (2), Chinese (1), Polish (1), Portuguese (1)
• Science Fiction: 17
• Short Stories: 3

Non-fiction: 72 (54.5 percent)

• Autobiography/Memoirs: 18 (25 percent of nonfiction)
• Biography: 4
• History: 25 (35 percent of nonfiction)

Ebooks Read: 82 (62.1 percent)

Library materials: 27 (20.5 percent) (includes ebooks)

Hazel Rochman, “Against Borders“