2020 Bookish Wrap Up (In Which We List Stats You Don’t Care About)

You’ve seen how our bookish goals for 2020 went, and now it’s time for us to get into the very detailed wrap up filled with lots of stats about how our reading went this year. This post features pie charts, bar graphs, and lists of our favorite books by genre! So before we end up rambling, here are all the details of how our reading went in 2020!

Malka:

Looking back this year was actually pretty great in terms of reading! I ended up reading 87 books, and while I would have liked to hit 100 books, 87 is still something to be quite proud of! I’ve linked to my Year In Books that Goodreads generates if you want to see all the books that I read and those stats, but some that I thought I’d share are the following:

📚 87 Books

📚 26,157 Pages

📚 Average Book Length: 300 Pages

📚 Average Rating: 3.8 Stars

These stats don’t surprise me too much. I had some good reading months and some bad ones, so an average of about 7 books a month sounds about right. This especially makes sense since you’ll see that my top 3 most read genres are romance, contemporary and graphic novels, none of which tend to have very high page counts. In fact, only one book that I read in 2020 was over 500 pages, so 300 pages makes a lot of sense! As for the 3.8 average star rating, I’m quite happy with that! I have a more detailed breakdown of my rating that includes half stars, but this sounds about right. I enjoyed a lot more books than I disliked! But that’s enough for the overall stats. This stats nerd is ready to get into the nitty gritty numbers!

First, let’s discuss the genres that I read this year! To absolutely no one’s surprise romance is my most read genre, followed by contemporary, which in turn was followed by graphic novels. What can I say? These are the genres I love to read! However, I did read poetry and manga that I really enjoyed for the first time this year! And I also varied my reading a smidge with some non-fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Honestly though, my 3 most read genres made up more than 85% of my reads last year, so I think I’m going to try to be a little more venturesome this year about the genres I read! We’ll see how that goes!

Although I didn’t track this throughout the year 32 of the books that I read were diverse in some way. Honestly, I wish this number were a lot higher, and I’ve already made it a goal to do better in 2021, with an action plan to make it easier to see if I’m accomplishing that goal.

Now we move on to my ratings! As you can see, I had no 1 or 1.5 star ratings, which makes sense, since I usually put down a book if I’m disliking it that much instead of finishing it. I did have six 2 stars and one 2.5 star, but out of 87 books, strongly disliking only 7 of them is a pretty great percentage! Then there were twenty 3 star ratings, and eleven 3.5 star ratings. I’m fine with that. Not every book is going to be a winner, and that’s okay! But the most exciting stat is how many 4 stars I had! 26! SO MANY! And then there are the five 4.5 star reads, and the eighteen 5 star reads! That means that there were 49 books that I really enjoyed, adored, or absolutely LOVED this year! THAT MAKES ME SO HAPPY! Basically, in terms of rating, this year was a huge win!

I’m actually quite proud of this format breakdown because in the beginning of the year I didn’t think I’d see even a single sliver of blue to represent me having read any audiobooks. But if you’ve read my post about my relationship with audiobooks, you know exactly which 2 books I managed to read via audio! I haven’t read anymore since then, but that’s something to work on in 2021! As for the 18 e-books, those were all romances that I borrowed from my library. The hardcover and paperback books were a mix of books I already owned, books I bought, was gifted, and ones that I borrowed from the library. I like the fact that I read in a mix of formats, and I hope that’s something I continue to do in 2021!

As you can see, I either bought or borrowed the majority of the books I read last year. This makes sense, because I tend to get a lot of books from the library, and even with COVID, I still took out 18 e-books, and then I borrowed 17 physical books when my library was open for lending. As for the ones I bought, I didn’t differentiate whether I already owned them or I purchased them in 2020, but either way, I’m happy that I made a dent in my physical TBR! It’s nice to know that even though I bought quite a few books in 2020, at least I somewhat balanced that by reading the books I owned! As for the ARCs, they were a mixture of physical and NetGalley copies, and regardless, I’m happy to see that I read so many of them! As for the gifts, I think it’s self explanatory that these were the books someone else bought for me, and I think that reading 8 of them is a good number, since I don’t have such a large number of gifted books. All in all, I’m happy with these stats, and would be fine to see similar numbers in 2021!

Now that we’re gone through all the stats, it’s time to go through some of my favorite books of the year!

Favorite of the Year

This book is in my number one spot for favorite book of the year. It’s everything I love in romance! If you’ve read my gushing review, I still stand by everything I said from when I first read it months ago!

Favorite Romances

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As you saw, I read a LOT or romance this year, and these were each my favorites for one reason of another. I have a review for Boyfriend Material, and when Act Your Age, Eve Brown releases in March, I’ll have a review for that one as well! As for Xeni and 40-Love, just read the synopsis, if you like the premise, you won’t be disappointed in the execution! Or of course, I’d be happy to chat with you about any of these books in the comments!

Favorite Graphic Novels

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I tried writing coherent words about what I loved about these graphic novels, and I just couldn’t. I find it really hard to verbalize what I love about books when I just feel like these books own a piece of my heart. So I’m going to just give really short snippets about why you should read each book, but know that that one brief thought doesn’t encompass everything that I love about that book.

For Heartstopper, I don’t need to say much. You’ve already heard it from everyone else. It’s adorable. It’s cute. It will bring a smile to your face. Just read it!

Snapdragon took me by surprise, but it’s very much a book about finding someone that understands you, and taking a chance, and discovering something new and unusual. I picked this book up on a whim, but now I want everyone to pick it up because I recommend it so highly!

Fangs is just a short book highlighting the love story between a vampire and a werewolf. It plays with so many of the myths and tropes, and warmed my heart with its cuteness!

There you have it! those are my favorite books! Those are my stats! Please let me know if I’ve convinced you to read any of my faves! And now you get to see how Chana’s year in reading went!

Chana:

Soooo, here are my 2020 reading stats! As I mentioned in our wrap-up, I managed to read 162 books this year. I’m not really sure if any of ya’ll actually care about the individual stats of it all, but it’s fun for me so I’m going to talk about them!

📚162 books

📚Average books length: 342 Pages

📚55,561 pages

📚Average Rating: 3.7 Stars

To be honest I went through my Goodreads and compiled all the stats right now for this post so for specific stats I wasn’t really able to keep such good track (which is why hopefully this year I’ll keep a spreadsheet throughout the year). But just by glancing through my Goodreads I was able to see that I read 40 books with POC MCs and 52 books with LGBTQ MCs and that makes me want to do better overall. Percentage wise that leaves only 25% of my reads with POC MCs and 32% with LGBTQ MCs, I don’t want to set a specific % for next year because ugh pressure but I do know that I want to read more diversely overall. 

And nextttt, I have my charts! Rating breakdown exposes how positively I rate books. I mean 61 4 stars??? WHAT. Lowkey surprised but also not really because I know I rate super laxly. 

For books by genre nobody is surprised that my top genre is Fantasy. I am incredibly predictable. 

I think my format and source charts kind of connect, because any book I got from the Library is bound to be an ebook. I separated borrowed and library because borrowed in this case just means books I borrowed from friends and relatives as opposed to the library.

And to finish it all off I thought I would mention some of my favorite books from this year!

Favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasies

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Color me surprised, my top books of the year are sapphic sci-fi fantasies. One thing about this year though, is that I used to avoid Sci-Fi but now my all time favorite genre (I’m not actually sure that this is a genre) is sapphics in space!

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Favorite Contemporaries

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These were all….so good. And for 2/4 of these authors I am readily (and eagerly) anticipating their next books! Looking at you Rachel Lynn Solomon and Adiba Jaigirdar.

What was your most read genre? What was your average book length? What are some of your 2020 favorites? What format do you read in the most?