Welcome to my post, today I’m sharing my books and reading stats of 2020! It hasn’t been the best year for our social or work lives, but it has been the year where I got back into reading, so that’s how I’m going to remember it today!

Side Note: I wrote my January TBR a few days in advance, so I didn’t realise that I would actually be able to finish The Goldfinch! I finished it an hour before 2020 ended, so I’ve added it to the number of books I’ve read but it won’t be included in stats since I wrote this a few days ago.

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The Stats

• I read 61 books this year! I set my goal lower, then changed it to 55 at the end of summer, but I smashed it this year! I’m aiming for the same amount next year too. So that’s an average of 5 books a month, but as you will see my reading changed wildly from each month!
• I had an average rating of 3.9. I think that’s pretty good, and as you can see from my monthly wrap up that score has been pretty consistent.
• My average book length was 379. I haven’t read too many big books, like I’m planning to in 2021.

Now for the tables and charts! These are all either from google forms or storygraph.

Age Range

I read a surprising number of adult books, a few young adult and almost no middle grade! I would like to read a few more young adult books next year though.

Genre

This was quite an interesting graphic. I didn’t realise how many historical fiction books I had read! I’m happy with the amount of contemporary I read, although I’d like to read much more fantasy next year. I’m severely lacking in classics, horrors and mystery/thrillers too!

Month read

This one’s very interesting (and a little embarrassing). You can see at the beginning of the year when I read one book a month until June, when I got back into reading, then the massive spike in August on holiday! Also, red is September, blue is October, purple is November, and turquoise is December, which were all fairly consistent months.

Rating

This is not my .5 rating system, but my goodreads rating system for 1-5 stars. Almost half are 4 stars, which accounts for 3.5 and 4.5 stars, so that’s the majority of my books! I’ve had lots of 3 and 5 star ratings too, and luckily not many 2 stars.

Book format

I’m not too surprised that I’ve had a similar amount of physical books and e-books, since I’ve been using the library and my kindle a lot. I’ve read a few audiobooks too, and I think I will request more audiobooks from Netgalley to utilise this format! Next year I’m going to also track where the books are coming from.

Pacing

This was an interesting chart I got from StoryGraph. I’m surprised by how many slow-paced books there are, although looking at my favourites, a large majority are less about action and more about character development and atmosphere.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Not too much non-fiction this year! Most of them have been history books and although I do want to read more history books and probably will next year when I start uni, I’m really enjoying fiction at the moment so it’s not a huge priority right now.

POC representation

For POC rep, I’ve only included Own Voices authors. I might distinguish between that in my 2021 tracker, as well as sub-sections of POC rep, because I know a lot of these books are from Asian authors, and I would like to read from more Black and Native American authors in the future. I’m okay with 55% but I do want to focus more on POC authors going into to 2021, so hopefully it can be even higher!

LGBTQ+ representation

I’m disappointed in only 30% LGBT+ rep, since I’m bi myself and I haven’t read from many sapphic or trans authors this year, but hopefully I can improve on that going forward. Just look at my 2021 releases post, there are so many great sapphic romances coming out soon!

Disability representation

Again, I’m disappointed in this one, especially because it’s physical disability and mental illness rep combined, but again I will be looking out for more books like this in the future.

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Spotlight

I also wanted to shine a spotlight on books I’ve loved and hated this year, with a few different categories:

Favourite book: The Dragon Republic. Check out my top ten favourites of 2020 here!

• Favourite Standalone: Circe.
• Favourite Series: The Poppy War, then Six of Crows!

Least favourite book: Probably Brideshead Revisited or The Invisible Man? Sadly both classics I hated!

Most surprising book: Heartstopper, I wasn’t expecting such a small series to fill me with so much joy and emotion! Perhaps also The Sword of Kaigen in that same vein, because I didn’t anticipate how heart-broken but also fulfilled I would be by the end.

Most Disappointing: The Shining. This was my first experience with a Stephen King novel and I was expecting much more than I got, purely because of the hype around him. It was okay but not as scary as I thought it would be!

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Thanks for reading this post and supporting my blog this year! How was your 2020?

—ella♥

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