2019 Reading Stats

I love hearing about the reading stats of others and it's been a while since I've shared my own so here we go. 2019 was a record breaking year of reading for me. I spent a lot of time in waiting rooms and I'm sure this was directly responsible for my increased reading results.

I read a new personal best of 75 books in 2019.

Gender

Gender never influences my reading choices but I continued to track my reading by gender in 2019. 69% of the books I read were written by female authors, 26% by male authors and 5% by more than one author. I was surprised to have read predominantly female authors and I will aim to have more balance in 2020. I'd like to make the point that my participation in the Australian Women Writer's Challenge has no influence on my choosing to read more women than men.

Author

I also find it interesting to track whether an author is new to me or not and in 2019, 71% of the authors I read were new to me, meaning the remaining 29% of books I read were by authors I've read before.

Genre

What did I read? Historical fiction formed the greatest portion of my reading at 20%; not surprising given it's my favourite genre. Non fiction formed 12% of my reading for the year which I'm very happy with.

Fiction and crime fiction formed 30% of my reading - 15% each respectively - and next was true crime which formed 7% of my reading.

Source

In 2018, review books from publishers, publicists and authors formed 79% of my reading while books I owned formed 13% and books borrowed from friends or the library constituted the remaining 8% of books. I began 2019 wanting to read more from my own TBR pile, so how did I do? Review books formed 75% of books read in 2019 so I managed to achieve a small reduction which is good. I also managed to increase the owned books I read to 21% and I can see a visual reduction in my physical TBR as a consequence which is fantastic.

In 2020, I aim to read at least one of my own backlist books every month. (E.g. not a new release or review book).

Monthly stats

You can see a corresponding trend in the two graphs above between books read per month and pages read per month. May was my best reading month of the year in terms of both number of books read and number of pages read with August being the worst.

Reading

On average I read 73 pages per day in 2019 and managed to get through one book every 5 days. I know I could read more if I went to bed earlier, but that's always the challenge isn't it? The average book length for me was 357 pages.

Ratings

In 2019 I gave 12 books a rating of 5 stars. This equates to 16% of my total reading and is considerably lower than 27% in 2018. My average star rating for the year was 3.5 stars and I'm quite happy with that because it means when I give a book a 4 or 5 star rating, it definitely stands out from the rest.

Giveaways

In 2019 I ran 9 giveaways and enjoyed giving away $360 worth of books and prizes. I'm already organising the first giveaway for 2020 and you can keep track of events on my giveaways page.

Tracking

It was my second year recording my data in the stats spreadsheet provided by Portal in the Pages and I look forward to using it again in 2020. Sophie provides the spreadsheet free of charge every year for booklovers to use and personalise and it's a lot of fun to track your reading habits and achievements.

Feel free to check out my Reading Year in Review on GoodReads too, where you'll see everything I read in a snapshot. Otherwise I'm looking forward to another productive year of reading. Do you track your reading stats?

Carpe Librum!