2019 End of Year Book Stats & Overview

Now that I've shared all of my favorite books from the past year, I finally get to share my favorite beginning of the year post--yearly stats! I love the information the Goodreads 'Year in Review' provides and ever since I started keeping track on my own of some information about the books and authors I read this year I've loved looking at those charts as well. 

I didn't include any of the readings I did for school, which would definitely add a few more books, but I figure I'll try to keep them separate from those I read more for pleasure.

150 books genuinely shocking to me. I always felt like it was taking me a long time to get through books this year, yet my monthly wrap-ups always seemed bigger than I anticipated...and somehow it ended up at this. That comes out to roughly 12-13 books a month and that seems mostly accurate (somehow). I always set my Goodreads goal around 50 or 60 books because I know I can probably hit that without too much stress, but I also unofficially aim to read a few books more than I read the previous year (without pressure), but next year I think it's safe to say that I am not going to attempt that, haha. This year was also busier for me than previous years, considering I started working more hours, started grad school in the fall, and still had my blog. I'm thinking I must've just really dived into my books as stress relief more heavily than I used to, otherwise I have no idea how this happened (or maybe I'm using my time more efficiently?).

I anticipated that Islandia would be my longest (second was probably Kingdom of Ash at ~900+, which was one of the first books I read this year!) and the two short stories by Mike Thorn would be the shortest, so no huge surprises there. It's a little amusing to see just how far apart those numbers are, though. Average length at 404 pages seems about right given that fantasy is my favorite genre and they tend to be on the longer side, though last year's average was apparently 382 pages. It's probably all those sequels that somehow grow in length after the debut!

I want to know what the most popular book would've been before I read The Night Circus since I have to say that I'm not that surprised by it being the most popular. I thought more people had read Mike Thorn's stories, but 30 still beats the the 3 from my low last year! My average rating, unsurprisingly, stayed the same from last year at 4.2 and that's largely due to the fact that I can't do half-star ratings on Goodreads. 

Also, I'm so excited that Spit and Song is the highest rated! It is highly deserved and such a great book, I'm glad people are loving it as much as I did. 

Stats:
Now we can dive into some of the stats I've collected from my spreadsheet! As with last year, I'd like to apologize for some of the font/color sizes on the labels on these charts. I'm not super fancy and used Google Sheets, so I couldn't adjust things as much as I'd like to be able to.

Genre

Compared to last year, I read 5% less fantasy and filled that in with other genres, so I guess I did a good(ish) job of branching out from fantasy, even though it's still the majority of what I read. The overwhelming majority of what I read is still within the speculative fiction realm, though, with categories like science fiction (10.7%), post-apocalyptic (1.3%), horror (6%), etc. I managed to up my historical fiction a bit as well, though for how much I love historical fiction I'm still surprised at how small of a percentage that one is. 

Target Audience

Once again, this is pretty predictable for me. I mainly read adult books with the occasional YA fantasy and I tend to read middle grade books at night before bed (I like to keep my books a little lighter because I tend to have very vivid dreams and would rather avoid any inspired by a dark book before bed). 

Format

This one's always interesting to me to see the result of. Just to explain my labels, ARC (23.5%) just means physical ARCs, eBook (3.4%) are those that I actually purchased, and eARCs (15.4%) are those from places like NetGalley or review requests from authors. Considering how few eBooks I buy (I prefer to buy physical), 3.4% seems like a lot. I am surprised that I read so many in hardcover format, but I think that has to be because of newer releases that come out in hardcover first.

Book Source

This is another one I always find really interesting! I can't believe so many come from publishers, but it makes me so thankful to authors and publishers for being willing to let me read books in exchange for a review--it's crazy to me that that is a thing and I'll never stop appreciating it. It also motivates me to stay up to date on my blog and keep going strong! I'm not sure if the fact that 15.4% are ones I've purchased means I'm good at not buying books or bad at reading books I already own...so we'll just gloss over that one.

Page Count

I don't know why Sheets organized this chart and its labels the way it did, but here we are. About ~65% of my books read this year are between 300-500 pages, which makes perfect sense considering those tend to be average page ranges of most books. It also cut out labels for 800-900, 900-1000, and 1000+, but I suppose that makes makes since I read only one book in each respective range.

This year I also kept track of some author stats for my own knowledge, so I figured I'd share the gender breakdown of books I've read! (For reference, 'both' refers to books that were coauthored by both a man and a woman, such as Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman for Aurora Rising). It's nice to see women dominating and I'm excited to add in some gender neutral rep this year. I hope to continue to expand and discover books from wide ranges of authors!

Tell me about your year in books! Do you keep track of information for stats like this? (If you do and you made a post that I haven't seen, leave me a link because I love looking at them! Or if you have any 'end of year' sort of post, link that also so I can check it out!)