I love looking at people’s videos and posts about whether or not they achieved their goals and the full year wrap up statistics so here is my contribution to the genre, of sorts.
Goal One: Read More Nonfiction
In 2017, I had read 10 works of nonfiction. Did I read more than 10 in 2018? Lol, not even close. In 2018, I read five works of nonfiction. I did read Bad Feminist, which was one of the two books I specifically mentioned that I wanted to get to in 2018, so I guess that can count for something?
Goal Two: Read More Male Authors
I set a goal to read 10% of my total books of the year by male authors and um, I read six books by men total. So… I definitely didn’t meet this, but to be fair, I really don’t care. I mean, should I be more even? Probably. But like… Why?
Goal Three: Read More Adult Books
I actually did read fewer YA books this year, although I mostly read romance instead. But you know, I feel good about that.
Goal Four: Re-Read More
I definitely succeeded with this one! Enough that I’m planning a whole Reflections on Re-Reading post. In total, I re-read 55 books. Of course, several of those are the Hidden Legacy trilogy and Psy-Changeling books, which I also read for the first time this year, but oh well.
Goal Five: Read More Diversely
This goal had different segments and one of the things I thought was kind of funny is that in both 2017 and 2018, I easily read from Asian American authors, but struggled with Latinx and Native authors. And by funny I mean exasperating. Like the goal was to fix under-reading Latinx and Native authors and instead I, um, didn’t. But I did set a goal that I would read between 25-50% of my total books from authors of color and I did that! I read 264 books total and of those 123 books or 46.5% were by authors of color (and two I didn’t count because they were anthologies with mixed white and authors of color)! I also wanted to look to make sure that the statistics hold up if I don’t count books in a way that means Nalini Singh alone gets me into the 25-50% range and so looking at the 111 books from different authors (errors probably happened here, but like, I tried really hard), I still read 46 books or 41.4% from authors of color.
I then said I wanted to read more books about characters who are trans, nonbinary, intersex, and asexual and like, tbh, I failed completely at reading LGBTQIA representation (in my opinion). I read about twenty books with LGBTQIA representation in 2018. A couple of those books did have asexual and trans characters, but I don’t think I had any with nonbinary or intersex characters. Anyway, improving my stats in terms of queer representation in 2019 is one of my goals as you may or may not know.
Finally, I wanted to read more books with neurodiversity and/or physical disability representation and, uh, well, I didn’t really set a numbers goal on this one so it’s hard to say if I achieved it or not. I can say that A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole was one of my favorites of the year and had fantastic ADHD representation! Also, A Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang had high functioning autism representation, as did A Girl Like Her by Talia Hibbert.
Other Statistics I Find Interesting…
This chart is not the easiest to read because while I didn’t read a ton of books from several of these genres, I did read a lot of genres… So essentially, what this chart is telling you that’s important to me is that my most read genre this year was Contemporary Romance (96 books) followed by Paranormal Romance (74 books). The other two slightly big-ish chunks are for Historical Romance (32 books) and YA/MG Fantasy (24 books). I found this fascinating for myself because like… I’d never read much PNR before this year and then I just took off with it. And for historical romance to be so low? Just surprising.
I read 69 books published in 2018, with 2017 being my second highest year at 43.
I read mostly digital books this year at 126 and then physical and audiobooks were pretty close at 68 and 70 respectively. I was really surprised to realize that I read so many audiobooks this year! Thank God for Hoopla, honestly. And my Audible Romance subscription.
I read 84 5 star books this year and my lowest rated books were ten 2 star books. I feel like this was a pretty great reading year, honestly, and I’m proud of myself for being more honest about my ratings. I usually feel bad when I don’t rate a book at least 4 stars, so I feel like I’ve been more honest with myself this year about how I’m rating them. Including half stars has helped too!
Okay, those are the statistics I thought I would share! Did you make a post like this? Let me know!
xx
firewhiskeyreader 