Department of Data

How many books did you read in 2023? Are you in the top 1 percent?

Analysis by
Staff writer|
January 5, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
(Washington Post illustration; iStock)
7 min

Most “what percent are you” analyses focus on how much money you make. But we prefer to shift the discussion to what really matters: how many books you read. By that metric, even a newspaper journalist may have a shot at becoming a one-percenter.

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The data on most books read comes from our friend David Montgomery, “the spork pollster” who released the results of a new Economist/YouGov poll about America’s reading habits not long after we published last month’s column about America’s biggest readers. Though the Department of Data was supposed to be closed this week in honor of our annual holiday sabbatical, we couldn’t resist popping into the office to do a quick update.