Happy New Year! (Favorite Books of 2023 Wrap Up)

Last year, I started off my Happy New Year post by saying “This year was a pretty big year for Buried in a Bookshelf.” — only to blow those stats out of the water in 2023!

Thanks to all of you, I had some of my best stats ever — I hit 5k and 6k monthly views for the first time, and then surpassed that with 11.7k views in December! Overall for the year, I saw an increase of 133% in views (compared to an increase of 48% in the previous year) and an increase of 145% in visitors (compared to 52%), and was excited to surpass my goal of 50k annual views and reach over 58.5k views (compared to 27.7k views) with over 47.9k, an increased in over 25k visitors from the previous year. Although these stats still might not seem like much, the first year I started blogging I was happy with reaching almost 3k views for the whole year (starting with my first post in April of 2017), so to reach so many new readers in one month (even over 2000 views in one day!) is really exciting for me.

I spent over 252 hours reading this year, on 39 different books (none of which are counting all the books I skimmed through on Kindle Unlimited). Definitely far from the unrealistic 100 book goal I set every year, but I still consider that a win!

This year, I have a ton more ideas for more consistent content, even though it’s already shaping up to be my busiest year yet outside of blogging, especially the first few months of the year. Still, I can’t wait to share a ton more bookish content (especially adaptation content!) with you all!

2023 was filled with a ton of awesome books, but I want to give a special shoutout to a new author I discovered — Maggie Rawdon! She released a bunch of great books in 2023, and has even more lined up for 2024. I’m only two books away from finishing her backlist, but that’s my first goal of the year!

Let me know in the comments what your favorite reads were, too!