2020 Reading Stats
Objectively, 2020 was a terrible, awful, horrendous year. The state of the world was (and still is) no good and bad thing after bad thing kept happening in my personal life. My reading year fell victim to this as well. I only read 76 books this year, which is not great for me. On top of not reading as many books this year as the last couple, I only rated five books 5-stars and two of them were re-reads of some of my favorite books of all time. From July through the end of October I was being emotionally put through the wringer by all the negative things going on in my life. As you'll notice, I didn't read a single book in September. There were a couple factors leading to this, including being in a reading slump from a book I read in August and grieving the loss of my Nana. I just struggled throughout the year to find the motivation or excitement to read and also didn't find myself picking up books that I was absolutely loving. The reason poetry is my highest read genre is because of the Children's and Young Adult Poetry class I took in my final semester of grad school. I did focus more on reading diversely this year, as you'll be able to see in the Author Gender Chart, but also in terms of the race of the authors I was reading from. I'll try to put some more interesting tidbits about the data in the charts compared to states from last year. I'm already feeling like 2021 is going to be a better reading year (and year in general)! ~Em
Like last year, my highest percentage of ratings was 4-star. However unlike last year, I only read five 5-star books and just generally felt meh about most of the things I read this year. The unrated category is for books I read for school that I didn't rate and some non-fiction that I learned from but didn't feel moved to rate.
Compared to last year, I read from fewer genres. In a normal year, I would never read so many poetry books, but I read all of them for a grad school class. Last year I discovered my love for manga and I read volumes from 3 or 4 different series this year, including my favorite, My Hero Academia. There weren't any other surprising numbers on this chart this year.
The summer months are almost always my highest reading months, but I was surprised to see I read 11 in February this year. It's also interesting to me how consistently I read 7-8 books in a month. Like I mentioned before, August, September, and October were really rough months for me, so I was not in a reading mood at all. Hopefully I'll be able to read more in 2021!
Though there are slightly different numbers, this distribution is the same as most years. I have always enjoyed reading physical books more than any other format. Last year I was able to listen to audiobooks more often because I commuted for half the year and I was able to listen to them while I was working. With my new job, I couldn't listen to audiobooks at work and was no longer commuting so I didn't read as many audiobooks this year. Physical/Audiobook is just books I either started on audio and finished physically or read the physical book at the same time I was listening to the audiobook.
It is always a goal for me to read more female than male authors. This chart may also be misleading because it is not how many authors of each gender, but how many books by authors of each gender. So the count includes multiple books by one author. I read 4 books by trans or non-binary authors this year and will be working to read even more in 2021. I feel like the multiple category might be self-explanatory but just in case it isn't, it is just books that have more than one author.
It's always fun to see what the oldest book I read each year is. This year it was Half Magic by Edward Eager, which was a gift from my mentor and former college professor. I'm surprised that I only read three 2020 releases, but what tends to happen is that the highest number of books from one year that I read in any given year is from the year prior. So for this year, that was the 19 books I read from 2019.
