Melting Pages
Book Reviews and Recommendations
2021 Stats & Wrap Up
Hi everyone! This post is going to be a combination of a few different things, mainly stats pulled from various places (Goodreads, StoryGraph, and my own reading spreadsheet) as well as some fun facts and answering some questions from the End of Study Survey questions that float around the internet at this time of year. If you want to check out any of my monthly wrap-ups, TBRs, or book hauls, check out this page here!
Related: 2021 Reading Goals | 2021 Reading Goals Review | Best of 2021 | Backlist Books I Want to Read in 2022 | 2022 Reading Goals | Most Anticipated 2022 Releases | Previous Yearly Wrap Ups
Monthly Page Count
In 2021 I read 48 books, for a total of about 20,136 pages, which isn’t bad especially considering how terrible my year was as far as the amount of books read! Normally, I average around 75 books a year so I didn’t read nearly as much. I ended up having two months that I read 6 books which was the most I read in a month, and the most pages read was in December at around 2,400 pages. I definitely pulled things together by the end of the year and so far, 2022 is off to a good start!
If I sort the books that I read by page count, I ended up reading 1 book that was under 300 pages, 37 books that were between 300-499 pages, and 10 books that were over 500 pages! This is where my 2022 goal comes in of wanting to read more books that are over 500 pages, I would really like to see that part of the graph be a little bigger. I’m still thinking that the 300-499 will still end up being the largest part of my reading though.
Genres
My most read genre, (no surprise here) was fantasy, but what does kind of surprise me is the fact that my second genre is tied between romance and mystery/thriller this year! Normally one of my top genres is Sci-fi, but that was pretty low on my list this year. Definitely an overwhelming amount of fantasy though, even more than in 2020! This is also the first year that horror made it to the list, which is pretty exciting.
Star Ratings
Even though I read fewer books this year, what is really interesting to me is that my average rating stayed at 4.22, which was the same average rating as in 2020. I definitely tend to rate more based on emotions and enjoyment rather than as a super critical reader. I also tend to try to read books that I know I’ll like, and if I’m not enjoying a book I tend to put it down and read something else. I mostly rated books 4 stars in 2021, and I’m hoping to use the CAWPILE system consistently in 2022 to see if my average changes!
Age Range
I know there was recently a lot of discussion (or just arguing) on twitter about people moving from YA to Adult, and personally I think that mostly comes down to people in my age range just naturally starting to read less about characters in their teens (or at least, that’s the case for me). I ended up reading 25 adult books and only 19 YA, so while it’s not a huge difference, it’s still more of a difference in 2020 where I read an equal amount of adult and YA so I’m definitely seeing that shift in my own reading.
Reading Format
This graph isn’t any surprise to me. Christmas of 2019 I got a kindle as a present, so in 2020 I ended up reading WAYYY more eBooks than anything else, and that trend continued in 2021. The main difference for this particular year is that there are absolutely NO audiobooks, which was really unusual for me! I listened to about 11 audiobooks back in 2020, and I’m hoping to add more audiobooks back into my reading for 2022, which I’m doing great on so far!
Reading Source
2021 was also the year that I read a TON of new releases and ARCs. In fact, almost 80% of the books that I read in 2021 were books that had a 2021 (or 2022) release date! I definitely have a lot of backlist books that I would like to read in 2022, and I always say that new releases are just a product of being a blogger/ reviewer – we’re always trying to review the new and hyped books! I also managed to re-read two books in 2021, which was nice to finally do.
StoryGraph Data
If you don’t have StoryGraph, you’re really missing out! It’s a great platform to find new books and to review on. They also have plenty of really great stats, including ‘moods’! StoryGraph will categorize books into different moods, and then will show you what moods you read the most of. I’ve consistently had adventurous, mysterious, and dark as my top 3 moods by quite a bit, and I’m expecting no difference in 2022.
StoryGraph also tracks pacing of books, and while I’m not sure if the moods and pacing are pre-determined by the team of librarians or if they are based off what readers are reporting (which I think is more likely). Either way, it’s an interesting stat to see, and I tend to read medium to fast-paced books! StoryGraph is a great alternative to Goodreads, and if you would like to add me as a friend, come add me here!
Bookish Superlatives
This section I think will be the most fun to write! Starting with my shortest and longest books. I had quite a big jump between the two, from 150 pages in Where the Drowned Girls Go to almost 1,000 pages in Dragon Mage! Both ended up making my best books of 2021 list, so I clearly was doing something right! My average page length ended up being 425 pages, and I think in 2022 I would like to get that closer to 500 pages.
My most and least popular books according to how many times they were shelved on Goodreads was actually pretty surprising to me, considering that this year I read some pretty popular books like The Duke and I, A Court of Thorns and Roses (my reread), and Firekeeper’s Daughter, which was part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club. It surprised me that the book shelved the most was The Midnight Library, but it did make my favorites of 2021 so maybe not so surprising.
I read a lot of books that had a lot of hype, but I feel like there was ONE book that I read specifically because of the hype, and that was Fire Keeper’s Daughter. It definitely lived up to the hype, and I’m very glad I chose to read it! One book that I read that I heard a lot of people loving that didn’t really do it for me was A Lesson in Vengeance. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it but it was more the atmosphere for me that I liked more than the story itself.
Looking back to my favorite books of 2021, I think I’ve narrowed down my top 5 (after not being able to do that in my best of 2021 list). My top 5 are For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten, The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne, The Bone Shard Emperor by Andrea Stewart, Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, and Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan! This was definitely the year that I started really reading and enjoying Asian-inspired fantasy, and it’s really paying off for me!
A post that I was going to make but ended up not doing is my disappointing reads of 2021. For the most part, these 5 books are on this list because at this point I don’t really remember much about them, or I rated them fairly low when I read them. The most disappointing and lowest-rated on this list for me was 56 days, which I gave 2 stars. What sucks is that 4 out of 5 of these were ARCs that I was really excited to read, and even if I enjoyed them at the time compared to everything else I read they were definitely a bit disappointing for me.
Related: All my book reviews
All Books Read in 2021
What do you think of my stats? Anything you think could be fun for me to track this year? I always love looking at these posts and while it takes me a while to make the graphics, this is one of my favorite posts to make!
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