I was recently thinking about how I used to read science fiction and fantasy almost exclusively, but in the past 20 years or so, that has changed. I was wondering where the changeover happened, so I went back to my booklists and started running some numbers. I started keeping a list of everything that I read in sequential order back in 2007, and while I knew that was about the time that I started getting into reading non-fiction, I also knew that the habit of reading sci-fi and fantasy persisted for some time after that. So, with that in mind, here are the numbers. The percentage listed is the percentage of books that I read that are not sci-fi/fantasy:
2007–13%
2008–18%
2009–18%
2010–25%
2011–13%
2012–21%
2013–26%
2014–48%
2015–56%
2016–60%
2017–63%
2018–73%
2019–75%
2020–77%
2021–80%
2022–79%
2023–76%
It looks like, aside from a jump of 22 percentage points between 2013 and 2014, the decline of my sci-fi/fantasy reading has been a gradual thing. It’s also interesting to note that the peak was in 2021 and has fallen slightly in both years since.
I think at some point soon I’ll be going back and tracking a couple of other genres, as I know that my reading of mystery, historical fiction, and non-fiction in general has gone up in recent years. It might be interesting to look at correlations to see when those genres started to rise as well.
What intrigues me is that large 22 point jump. The next highest jump after that is between 2017 and 2018, with a ten point jump. It makes me wonder what was going on in my life and in the world at those times to cause my reading habits to shift like that, especially that big one. And it may just be that I found different kinds of books more readily during those periods, but I find it food for thought.
Have you ever scrutinized your reading habits? Did you find out anything interesting?