2020 Reading Wrap Up

Hi everyone! Today I’m finally getting around to posting my 2020 reading overview. If you’re someone who loves looking at people’s reading stats, this post is for you! I’ll be going through all the books that I read in 2020, along with different breakdowns like page count, star rating, genre, format, and more! I love reading these posts, and making them can be pretty fun too with all the graphics. Plus I love having a record of my reading nicely written out on my blog!

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Pages Read, Shortest and Longest Book

I read an average of 2,128 pages a month, with the month that I read the fewest pages being November (722 pages) and the month with the most pages read being February (3,053 pages). Not bad at all! My shortest read was actually the chapter sampler for Lore, which was only 72 pages. My longest read was House of Earth and Blood which came in at 803 pages! My average book length was 360 pages, which is lower than I would’ve hoped it would be.

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Books per Month and Genres

I averaged 6 books a month in 2020, which is typical for me. Just over half of the books that I read were fantasy, which isn’t surprising to me, HOWEVER I am a little surprised that romance has taken my #2 spot and bumped science fiction down to my third most read genre!

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I read 33 adult books, 35 young adult books, and 4 new adult books, although a lot of the books I read could be considered one or the other depending on where you’re from, so this statistic doesn’t matter too much. What is notable is that I didn’t read any middle grade, which is normal for me as I don’t ever read middle grade. Some books that were labeled as YA were definitely on the younger end of that age group.

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Ratings and Favorites

I tend to rate my books highly, mainly because I’m 100% the kind of reader/reviewer who bases ratings more off my enjoyment, rather than reading critically. That’s not to say I don’t touch on things like that, but I generally don’t notice things like writing or formatting unless it’s something that pulls me out of the story itself. My average rating for 2020 was 4.3 stars, which is pretty good!

Because I used the wonderful tracker made by Kal from Reader Voracious in 2020 (which I’m also using for 2021 and I highly recommend), I’m able to see my favorite books from each month. What’s really interesting is how this list of 12 compares to my best of 2020 list, because only 8 from my list of 12 made it to my best of list. Choosing one favorite book a month was tough, because some months I would have multiple favorites that ended up bumping out other books for my best of list!

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Author Stats

A whopping 73% of the books that I read in 2020 were by authors that I had never read from before, and the majority (82%) of the books that I read were by authors who identified as female. I did want to track authors who identify as BIPOC or LGBTQ+, but I didn’t feel comfortable putting authors into these categories, as some authors I couldn’t find any information on how they identify. For this same reason, I didn’t feel comfortable marking books as #OwnVoices, because sometimes an author may not want to disclose that information.;

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Format, Source, and Release Dates

I always find these graphs to be some of the most interesting, especially as I grow as a reviewer. I’ve definitely seen an increase in the number of ARCs that I’ve been reading (partially thanks to the fact that I now have a kindle). Because of that purchase, 66% of the books I read in 2020 were e-books! This is probably one of my biggest changes, as before 2020 I was primarily reading physical books. The majority of the books that I read were ones that I spent my own money on, but 28% of my reading consisted of ARCS. I’m also pretty happy with my release date ratio, with most of my books being backlist titles (2019 or older) with 2020 releases and ARCs being pretty evenly split.

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Book Cover Stats

These were just some additional stats that I found interesting that I wanted to track just for fun! I found that the colors, names, and cover design were pretty much what I’ve come to expect from fantasy, but it’s just interesting to see that play out in my own stats considering that not all of the books I read this year were fantasy. Most of my read books were blue and the word dark showed up in the title most often.

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Books Read in 2020

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What books did you read in 2020? What stats do you think I should track in 2021? Any other fun kind of stats like covers or anything? Let’s chat!