06 Feb The 2024 PGTPL Adult Reading Challenge By the Numbers
It may be February, we haven’t fully caught up from 2024! The 2025 Adult Reading Challenge may have launched in January, but we wanted to take a look at what the community read for the 2024 Adult Reading Challenge. We gathered some interesting statistics from last year, including some of your favorite books and authors!
Wow, you read a lot!
An incredible 352 books were read by participants in 2024! Of the 352 books reported, a whopping 323 of them were unique, meaning only one person participating in the challenge read them. If these books were, on average, one inch thick, they would make a stack nearly 27 feet high!
The early bird gets the worm; the late bird also gets an equally tasty worm
The earliest date someone completed the 2024 Challenge was April 26; the latest was December 19.
- April 26 is the anniversary of ice hockey’s Olympic debut at the Antwerp Games (1920), as well as the birthdate of Marcus Aurelius.
- December 19 is the date that George Washington’s Continental Army made camp at Valley Forge in 1777; it is also the day Apollo 17 returned to Earth, with a crew of three humans and five mice who were the most recent Earthlings to visit the moon (the mice were named Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey).
Widely read and widely applicable
The most frequently mentioned book was The Women by Kristin Hannah, which was also the book that turned up as a response for the greatest number of prompts! Participants applied it to four categories:
- Prompt #9: A book from your to-be-read pile
- Prompt #10: A book inspired by a literary classic
- Prompt #14: A book that feels like a literary adventure
- Prompt #16: A recommendation from a librarian or friend
Great minds thinking alike
For two of the challenge prompts, three people reported reading the same book.
- A book whose title starts with “D”: Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich
- A Kirkus Prize winner or nominee from any year: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
We hope you enjoyed the books you read in 2024 – we certainly enjoyed hearing about it! If you’d like to participate in the 2025 Adult Reading Challenge, stop by the Adult Services desk or head to pgtpl.net/ARC25 to print out a form. This year, everyone who completes the challenge and turns their form in will receive a free book. Happy reading, and keep an eye out for next year’s Reading Challenge Wrapped!
