I posted the End of Year Survey a few days ago, but it doesn’t quite cover everything I want to wrap up from 2019.
Stats
First up, some visuals! I love charts, but I hate making spreadsheets. I’m (just barely) capable of super basic ones, so this is not something I created. I found it on Book Riot’s website either early last year or late 2018, and then husband helped me make a few changes I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own. It looks like they’ve brought it back and made some updates for 2020, so I’m super excited to check that out later because I love the charts and I (mostly) enjoyed using it last year. (That said, it did have a few issues I never bothered trying to fix, like showing my average reading time as almost 3,000 hours per day haha.)
In 2019, I DNF’d 2% of books I started (that worked out to 3 books, but I think I actually missed adding one), which isn’t bad. I think all of those were actually from the first 3ish months of the year.
4% of books I read were nonfiction (5 books), which surprised me.
I read 101 things by women, which worked out to 73% of everything I read. (That probably includes duos like Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, for example.) I read 1 book (0.7%) by an author I know identifies as non-binary, but there might have been more I wasn’t aware of.
46% of my books were print (62 books), 32% were e-books (43 books), and 22% were audiobooks (30 books).
For the target age ranges, I read 58% (78 books) for adults, 37% (50 books) that were YA, and 5% (7 books) that were middle grade.
54% (73 books) were things I already owned, and 34% (46 books) were from the library. I read 8 (6%) ARCs, 7 (5%) books I purchased in 2019, and I borrowed 1 (0.7%) book.
Only 12% (16 books, I’m not sure why the chart image is showing 13.2%) were 2019 releases, and the other 88% were backlist titles. (That’s great because I was participating in Beat the Backlist š )
My most read genre was fantasy, accounting for 43% (58 titles) of what I read last year. My second highest genre was horror at 13% (18 books), with romance coming in at third place with 17 books (13%). My least read genre was historical fiction, accounting for about 2%.
The most popular rating I gave books was an even 4 stars. I gave 43 books 4 stars, which works out to about 32%. Not bad, not bad, but 8 of those were re-reads. I gave 22 books 5 stars, which shocked me, but what was more surprising was that only 3 of those were re-reads. I didn’t have any even 1 star reads, but I did have a 1.5 star (Caraval, which I reviewed here). I forgot to change the rating on it (I originally have given it 2 stars because I was afraid to call it a 1-1.5 since it’s so popular), so it’s not reflected in the charts, but that was the only book I had that I rated under 2 stars.
70% of everything I read were novels (95 books). I do count short stories, even on goodreads, because I track my pages read. I had 16 short stories in 2019, which is about 12%.
About 15% of books (20-21 books) I read were by authors of color and/or had POC characters.
I’m really not sure how accurate the LGBTQ+ stats are (and I feel super creepy googling authors to find out if they’re out of the closet), but I know at least 13 books were by queer authors (about 9%) and 14 had at least one queer main character (about 10%).
So, my chart shows that about 13% of things I read were in translation, but the majority of those were fairy tales. In reality, I think I only read 2-3 books that were translated.
The #OwnVoices stats are low, but I wasn’t particularly vigilant about this one. I’m still hazy on the details of what does and does not count, but I was confident enough to mark 5 books as #OwnVoices (about 4%). I’m hoping that number is higher for 2020 because I do have several books on my shelves I know count. (I also read a few books that dealt with mental illness, but I don’t think I tried to find out if those were #OwnVoices.)
Finally, we have page and books per month stats.
My most popular page range for books was 300-400 pages (38 books), but I also read a fair number of 400-500 page books (26).
My best reading month was April with 22 books (thank you, Magical Readathon haha). My worst months were July and November, with only 2 books each of those months, and December was a close third with only 4 books read.
Year-Long Reading Challenges
Okay, this is super long already, so I’m not going to do a breakdown of exactly what I read because I read over 130 things last year (16 of which were short stories, though), but I’ll give some quick stats.
Pop Sugar Reading Challenge
I completed 34 out of 50 prompts. 3 of those were from the “Advanced” section.
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge
I completed 17 out of 24 challenges.
Reading Women Challenge
I completed 13 out of 26 prompts (I did count 1 book for 2 prompts once though).
Beat the Backlist
As I mentioned earlier in the stats section, 88% of what I read in 2019 were backlist books. That’s over 100 books, but I’ve closed the tab and don’t have the exact number written down š
Goals
I won’t recount my first half of the year goals because I did post an update about those before I created my second half of the year goals. So, for the second half of the year, I wanted to:
- Read five or more books that have been on my shelf/Kindle for a year or longer ā
- Get through at least most of my ARCs/giveaway books ā
- Complete at least 60% of the prompts for the challenges Iām participating in ā
- Read three classics (or more) ā
- Read at least two non-fiction books ā
That’s 60% accomplished, so I’ll call it a win, but just barely haha.
For the challenges, my goal was to complete 60% of the 100 total prompts from those 3 reading challenges combined, and I completed 64%.
And… I think that’s everything I want to touch on for 2019.
I thought about doing a top 5 or top 10 best and worst list, but I’m not sure. If that’s something you’d be interested in seeing, let me know because I haven’t trashed the idea completely yet.
