I! love! reading! stats! and today that’s what I’m gonna be talking about: some surprising and not-so-surprising trends from my 2020 reading. The amazing reading spreadsheet I use is made by Brock from Let’s Read–I highly recommend it it’s super versatile and comes with so many useful and beautiful graphs!!
So in 2020 I read a total of 160 books, which is the most books I’ve ever read in a year. This is due to a number of factors, but mainly it was because a) I was at home all the time due to The Pandemic and b) I wasn’t in school for most of the year, so I didn’t have any classes to do work for. Honestly reading was like the one thing keeping my mental wellbeing together last year so I’m glad it worked out lol.
As for genres, this isn’t super surprising to me, but there are some new additions compared to my genres from 2019. My top genres are: literary fiction with 35.6% (it’s my bread and butter, so not surprising), non-fiction with 18.1% (also not surprising, I like to sprinkle in some non-fiction reads every now and then), and then after that it’s a smattering of other genres like romance (9.4%), fantasy (7.5%), and classics (6.9%). Romance was definitely a new genre for me in 2020, and I loved getting to explore so many delightful new romance reads. I expect the romance percentage to be much higher in 2021 since I’ve now fully committed to reading romance. I’d also like to read more fantasy this year, since I loved reading The Poppy War trilogy so much last year.
This is by far my most noteworthy reading stat from last year. In 2020, 77.5% of my reading was digital (124 books) and only 22.5% was physical (36 books). The library was closed most of the time due to The Pandemic, and then I was paranoid about reading library books for Pandemic-Related Reasons, so I pretty much only stuck to ebooks and audiobooks unless I was sent a review copy from the publisher. As you can see, 55.6% of the books I read were ebooks, and 21.9% were audiobooks. If it weren’t for my e-reader I would’ve read like nothing last year lol.
My average rating in 2020 was 3.29 stars. Most of the ratings I gave were 3 stars (28%, 45 books), which is not super surprising to me since that tends to be my default rating when I feel like a book is just okay or mediocre. I think there are also a lot of 3 stars because those tend to be the books that are good enough to finish, but not so good that I actually consider them a favourite. You’ll also see that there aren’t many books that I’ve rated 2.5 stars or lower because if I dislike a book that much I tend to save myself the trouble and just DNF it. Finally, I’m SUPER STINGY with my 4.5 and 5 star ratings so not many books there either. I’ll also say that a lot of the 5 star ratings in this graph include rereads–mainly my Jane Austen rereads–so that number is actually slightly inflated.
Most of the books I read were new releases, which is, again, not super surprising I guess. I just get so caught up in the hype and I like shiny new things lol. I find it’s also hard to be excited by books that have been on my TBR for years. So maybe I need to rethink how I approach my TBR a little bit. (Also the books that were published pre-1920s are pretty much all Jane Austen rereads lol.)
This graph is super interesting to me because 2020 was the first year in which I started to track the publishers whose books I was reading. Four of the big five publishers feature the most here, with Penguin leading at 33.8%, followed by HarperCollins (11.3%), Simon and Schuster (11.3%) and Macmillan (9.3%). After that, it’s just a bunch of mostly indie presses, which I’m super happy to see. Reading books from indie presses is something that I definitely wanna prioritize and keep an eye on this year, especially because I tend to end up really enjoying their books.
The US and the UK are pretty much always the countries that I read the most from, taking up 39.3% and 26.7% of my reading, respectively. I’m super happy to see Ireland with 10.7%, since I love Irish lit so much. And then after that there’s a bunch of other countries including Japan (4%), China (4%) and South Korea (2%)–definitely not very high numbers. One thing I want to do this year is read more translated fiction, so that should introduce some variety into these stats. Also more Japanese lit!
Blog Stats:
And last but not least, a little section for my blog stats!! 2020 was the year I started blogging in earnest, so it’s wild seeing how much I actually ended up posting. I didn’t feel like I posted that often, but apparently I did, with 79 total posts (I feel like that’s a lot for me), almost 600 comments (??????), and 60k words written across those blog posts. I have no idea what other people’s blog stats look like, but I’m honestly really proud of myself for, like, actually committing to this blogging thing. I’m gonna try to be consistent this year too, though I have classes now so I’m not sure how that’s gonna go…
I just wanna end this post by saying thank you to everyone who interacts with my posts in any way 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 I can’t believe people actually read my posts and like actually trust my opinions on books ??? I’ve made so many lovely book blogger friends over the past year and I’m gonna do my best to try and support yall and hype you up because you’re all great and I always love seeing your posts in my feed!!! 🥺
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