I checked my Goodreads 2025 Reading Challenge goal the other day. I knew I’d gone over my goal of 95 books, but then I saw this:
Whoa! What in the world?
Yes, I’ve read some novellas this year, but not that many! And yes, audiobooks have upped my reading totals the last couple of years, but not by that much!
So what happened?
It isn’t as if I’m neglecting other things. I wrote a book this year. I edited several clients’ books this year. I read my Bible through one-and-a half times and spent some prolonged time studying and memorizing various books and passages.
I’ve even been able to go to sleep earlier (thank you, melatonin!), which means I haven’t been staying up late and reading.
I started doing a little investigating and right off the bat came up with something interesting: the total number of the books marked as “finished” on my 2025 spreadsheet (I’ve been keeping one for years!) isn’t the same as my Goodreads total for 2025. It’s off by about 25 books! Isn’t that odd?
I tried to compare, to see if I’d missed logging books somewhere, but I didn’t find any discrepancies! Even then, I’d be more likely to forget putting them on Goodreads than in my spreadsheet!
Still, my spreadsheet says 140 (at the moment), which is far and above my goal and 20 more than my highest year (2024).
Maybe I read more books with fewer pages?
The mystery will likely remain a mystery. But it has been a great year for reading!
Now I’m curious about my total for this year. If it’s higher than 2024’s 20 or so books, I’ll take it as a win. (Shows you that 2024 was a bit of a year, no?)
It’s always such a fun stat–and to see what the year was like stress-wise, to see the correlation!
I have doubled my goal for the year. Also due in part to audio books and a few novellas. Wish I could write as voraciously as I read
I agree. Sigh.
I know what happened. If I have a book in my kindle library and read it, it is counted on goodreads. I also put it in currently reading and it also counts. Just for the challenge. My goodreads shelf count is a bit lower.
This started at the beginning of the year . If you go into your challenge to see what books are there, you will see some that have “Author not available” beside it and no cover image. I suspect these are duplicates.
Interesting! I’ll have to go look at that! Thanks!
Just looked and you are so right! My kindle account includes my husband’s kindle, so it counts his books read and my sister has a kindle connected to my account, so ditto there, too. Thanks for clearing up the mystery!