Tag: statistics

The Stats for 2025 and December Summary

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you’ve managed to have some fun or else get some rest, and also get some nice reading or film viewing or other cultural delights during this festive period. I’ve already told you about my best of the year reading in the months January to June, and then July to December, but let me also quickly summarise my reading in December and then share some general blogging and reading stats with you.

December Reading

I tried to read light, amusing or thrilling fare in December, so needless to say it was only the Kafka biography (which I finally finished after about 3-4 months of reading) that really stuck to my mind. Of the remaining eight books, seven were in German (although two were translations, from German and Spanish), mostly borrowed from the library. I’ve only reviewed one of the books, Kesten’s Happy People.

Four of the German language books were crime novels, but I only really enjoyed Transatlantik by Volker Kutscher (although I felt he was stringing it out a bit too much with Rath’s nemesis, would have liked a fresher story). Sadly, the Viennese Brenner novel by Wolf Haas (a series I usually really enjoy) was rather average on this occasion, not quite as humorous and satirical as usual. The book featuring Angela Merkel as a Miss Marple type detective after her retirement was rather too cosy and silly for my taste, while Petra Hammesfahr’s psychological thriller was simply too predictable and long-winded compared to other books I’ve read by her. So, all in all, a bit of a disappointment.

I did not finish Amadeus on a Bike by former tenor Rolando Villazon, although it was set in one of my favourite cities, Salzburg, featured lots of music and Mozart. There were a few interesting insights behind the scenes of a major classical opera festival, but there was excessive names-dropping and a rather silly love story which simply did not capture my imagination. Complete coincidence, but the staging of Die Fledermaus that we went to see on New Year’s Eve was directed by Villazon as well, and his three time frame interpretation (set in 19th century Vienna, 1950s East Berlin and a spaceship in the future) was a bit puzzling – fun but not entirely sure it added that much to the operetta. So perhaps Villazon and I are simply not on the same wavelength.

I quite enjoyed the Japanese book by Tsumura Kikuko, known in English as There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. It’s on the quieter rather than the shocking side of Japanese fiction and I may try to review it for January in Japan. And I was intrigued by the non-fiction book about how AI companions are reshaping our personal relationships, and the words of caution about who is going to be holding such sensitive personal data in the future.

Annual Reading

I still use Goodreads for tracking, because I’m too lazy to start anything new, and it works well enough for me. I’ve read 128 books this year (my target was 120) and I think you can see quite clearly that my reading dropped off in the second half of the year as I started preparing and then making the move abroad. Quite different to 2016, the last time I had a major international move (175 books read, but that was the year I was trying to escape from a miserable home life by immersing myself in literature, while this year I was pretty happy overall).

I’m quite stingy about giving out five star reviews, although I did have quite a few four star reviews this year. But here are the ones that I scored highest this past year – and of course, made my favourites list in my previous blog posts. Three Koreans! Who’d have thought? Maybe that’s the reason why I’ve started learning the language, although I’m not a very diligent student.

Annual Blogging

I’ve posted the lowest number of posts since I started blogging: 126 posts, and majority of those were in the first half of the year as well. I haven’t reviewed much in the past few months. My most-read post of the year was a review though: Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat, which I read for the International Booker Shadow Panel.

I believe that quite a few of my online bookish friends are also experiencing a bit of a blogging fatigue, and have either reduced the number of postings, or the format (doing a monthly set of mini-reviews or thematic shorter reviews and the like). I am not quite sure what I will do next. There is a temptation to go back to my early blogging days, in which I simply share my interests and bits of writing rather than stick to predominantly reviewing. I might take a bit of a break or switch to reviewing only the most impressive/memorable books and then merely mentioning the others in a monthly summary.

Whatever happens next, thank you so much for reading and commenting throughout 2025. I appreciate all my visitors, the many from the US (nearly double the number of visits than the UK, which is the second largest group), as well as the single (possibly in error) visit from Norfolk Island, Tajikistan and Samoa. Wishing you all a healthy, happy and successful 2026, however you wish to define success!

Give me the quiet representation of fireworks in Hiroshige’s woodblock print over the noisy and smoky real things any time!

Here come the stats for 2024!

I don’t have Spotify or other fancy apps to give me a 2024 Wrapped version, but I do have some bookkeeping on Goodreads and Letterboxed. So here are my stats for this past year.

Books:

I read 142 books (this does include a handful of DNFs – less than ten), over 35,000 pages, of which Cannibals was the shortest (only 88 pages) but possibly the one most indelibly imprinted on my retina, and Verena Rossbacher’s Mon Cheri officially the longest (512 pages, although that might be because the print was bigger than for the Annual Banquet… for example) – and quite possibly one of the more forgettable ones. Of those books, 84 were in or from other languages, so it’s perhaps no wonder that they made up the majority of my most memorable reads.

The clear favourite country was Japan, with 23 books translated from Japanese (and another 3-4 set there but written by foreign authors). But I also spent some time in other East Asian countries – South Korea accounted for five books, while Vietnam, Taiwan and China contributed with one each. My usual staple favourites, i.e. books in French and German, didn’t fare too badly, with six and ten titles respectively, and there were ten Romanian books I read for pleasure (rather than merely prowling for possible future translations into English). However, it was Spanish and Portuguese that had an upsurge this year, with ten titles, more than in previous years I believe.

Fireworks at Ryogoku by Utagawa, Edo period, from Tokyo National Museum.

Films and TV series:

I watched 134 films this year, my highest number since I started logging them on Letterboxd in 2020, and bear in mind that many of those are actually TV series rather than one-off films, so that is far too many hours of viewing, I believe! I also seem to have become less harsh in my rating, as I have one five star (a rewatch of In the Mood for Love, one of my all-time favourite films), and no fewer than 28 with either 4 or 4.5 stars. My older son will be in shock, since he seems to think I’m congenitally unable to give more than 3 stars for most films! Of those 28, 23 were Asian (mostly Korean and Japanese, but also some Taiwanese and Chinese or Hong Kong), so that shows you perhaps where my heart and head has been for the better part of the year. It almost feels like being back at university once more, but this time with far easier access to books, music and films from the region.

The lowest scoring film was a Romanian Made for Netflix one, called Selfie 69, which I can barely remember beyond the fact that it irritated me, and which I reviewed as follows at the time:

Wanted to see what young people in Romania are talking about, how they’re behaving…. but boy, those houses were like nothing I’ve seen in Romania! It’s that kind of Western aspirational vacuous comedy that didn’t feel very funny at all (some instances of assault and misogyny).

Music:

I don’t make much effort to keep up-to-date with new releases nowadays, so the only recent songs I’ve enjoyed are the ones I could add to my Upbeat Music playlist (for exercising): ROSÉ & Bruno Mars APT, Megan Thee Stallion Neva Play (feat. RM) and Mamushi (feat. Yuki Chiba), or else new releases by some of my long-time favourite Japanese women musicians such as Electricity by Utada Hikaru, or Faster than Me by Iri or Luciférine by Aoba Ichiko.

However, the main emphasis has been on nostalgia, and my playlists are full of favourite songs from all decades, sparking many happy memories. Some of them I reminisce over with old schoolfriends, while others I get to enjoy all over again with my sons. Skiing down the slopes in Poiana Brasov by full moon singing Ben E. King’s Stand By Me. Falling in love in Cambridge while dancing to Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata Song. Dancing around in my kitchen even in the most difficult times during the divorce to Janelle Monae’s Make Me Feel. And, of course, feeling the pain of having my name constantly mispronounced or misremembered with The Ting Tings. And most of them are also suitable for my 140 BPM playlist (165 tracks, over 6 hours of music), which keeps me sane and well-exercised, although my sons complain that they have to listen to me singing along to it…

Beyond Stats:

The key word this year has been ‘Nostalgia’, but in a very positive, healthy way. I’ve reconnected with dear old friends, listened to music that has given me pleasure in the past, rewatched many favourite films, and even reread some books. Rereading old letters and diaries reminded me at times what a pretentious, wilful, even insufferable youngster I was, but it also reminded me of my resilience, huge appetite for exploration and curiosity about the world (which remain undiminished) and that I was very much loved, even though I didn’t realise it at the time. After feeling quite old and decrepit last year, with my sudden onset of arthritis, I’ve been feeling much younger and more energised this year.

Some may call it a midlife crisis, but I’m not desperate to recapture my youth. Instead, I’m open to new adventures, with the maturity and wisdom I have now, but with some of the energy and hope I used to have earlier. This has given me a bit of distance from the madness, political turmoil, unbearable violence and trauma of the world around us. It has been a difficult decade for me personally since about 2014, so it’s a relief to see that my elastic band is snapping back into position now. I’ve no doubt my optimism will be sorely tested in 2025, but here’s hoping almost against hope that it will be a better year than we might expect.

Happy New Year! See you all safely in 2025!

The Pine Tree of Success on the Sumida River. Print from 1936 by Takahashi Hiroaki.