My Goodreads Year in Books! <– You can click here to see Goodreads stats for me without my commentary. LOL!

Book and Page Stats

I beat my reading goal by 113%, which was nice. I wasn’t scrambling too hard at the end, even though I had a pretty big reading slump earlier in the year that could have thrown me off my game.

115 books translates into an average of 9.6 books per month; or one book every 3.2 days.

Below is a graphical representation of the number of books that I read per month. You can see that in the first half of the year, I wasn’t really reading too much. Still a decent pace, but for me, it was a slump. June – no books? Really? In August, I was introduced to BookTube and it reinvigorated my love for reading.

Looking at my reading trends over the past several years, you can see that in 2013, I had my biggest reading year, with 200 books read. My goddaughter was born in 2013, and I was reading and reviewing a *lot* of children’s books for her.

Looking at page counts over the past several years, you can see how I stopped reading so many short children’s books and started reading more adult or YA books. So, while I had read almost twice the number of books in 2013, my page count in 2018 is greater.

I don’t know why Goodreads has my page count as 33,843 in one graphic and 33,926 in another. Perhaps they are counting some of the pages in books that I have started and marked as “In Progress?”

For the sake of my calculations, I’ll use the smaller number of pages. I averaged 2,820 pages per month, and 93 pages per day.

My shortest book was one of my goddaughter, Gabby’s, books.

My longest book was “Winter’s Tale” that I felt like I listened to via Audible a lifetime ago. Was that really just last year?

My average book length was 294 pages, which is pretty good!

Star Rating Stats

These are my books broken down by star rating. I did give the majority of my reads 4 stars. They have to really move me to be given 5 stars. I give out 3 and 4 stars fairly easily, and feel a little bad about giving out a 2 or 1 star rating.

According to Goodreads built-in rating scale 2 is “OK” and 3 is “I like it,” but I tend to see 2s as more “meh/not for me” and 3s as more “it was OK.” For me to give out a 1 star, I have to really not like the book for some reason.

If you can see the little thumbnails, yes, I do have two copies of “The Martian” on my 5 star row. This is because I read a copy on my Kindle and I listened to the audiobook separately (not concurrently). I have now read “The Martian” about 29 times and my brother keeps trying to ban me from ever reading it again. So, I purchased the French translation copy, “Seul Sur Mars,” which should be arriving from Amazon France at the end of January 2019. 🙂 (Also, thanks to Emmmabooks for showing me that I can and should buy and read copies of my favorite books in multiple languages!)

This year, my only 1 star was “Clear” by Jessica Park. It was good for the first 50 pages or so, then went off the rails in a bad way and had a horrible plot resolution. Horrible. Implausible and – are you serious? It took me forever to finish the book and I’m surprised that I slogged through. This doesn’t say anything about Jessica Park’s other books, which I have really enjoyed.

“Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes,” I just couldn’t get into. This isn’t to say that I might not pick it up at some point in the future and like it. I just wasn’t feeling it at the time. This is why I put it on my DNF shelf, but didn’t give it a star rating.

This sounds like a high average for me. But looking at the graphic, it looks like I lucked out with a pretty significantly high number of 5 star books. Also, the lack of 2 and 1 stars….

I wonder if I should adjust my scoring for next year and move some of my 2.5 stars down to 2?

The Popularity Contest

This did not surprise me. I thought ACOMAF was fantastic! 🙂

I was fairly surprised that “The Girl on the Train” was the most popular book on my shelf. I was *not* surprised about “Gabriella the Superhero,” as I had to add that title to the database. 🙂 Before “Gabriella,” by next Least Popular title was “Exploring Seeds” – a children’s non-fiction title that I picked up late in the summer when I thought that I was going to do the Harry Potter OWL and NEWT challenges (Herbology, yo!). Alas, I didn’t complete the challenges.

However, I did learn something about my reading habits: I am a mood reader. I will *not* read it if I do not “feel” like it at the time. This actually surprises me somewhat, since I am normally very competitive and generally find challenges to be compelling.

In fact, this changed the way I viewed my goals for 2019. This year, I am not going to sign up for a lot of very strict challenges (like PopSugar or the Quarterly YA challenges with 10 categories every 3 months).

I find that if I try to constrain what books I can read too much, I’ll end up not reading at all. So my goals are more fluid.

To help me reach my goals – and for a fun way for me to track my reading – I purchased “The Bookworm Life” planner from my friend, Monica. It is adorable! You can buy it from her on Etsy, using the link above. (She also has lots of adorable bookish stickers for your calendar, bullet journal, or planner!)

More Random Stats

• 48 authors I have read before, but 67 were new-to-me. (I counted the first book in a series as a new author and subsequent books as read-before.)
• I read 50 books across 27 different series. Of those, I’ve completed (as far as I know) 6 of the series, and would continue with 14 of the series. I really get attached to characters and worlds and like to live in them as long as I can, so series are really attractive to me.
  • Asylum (1)
  • Blood of Eden (1)*
  • Breathing (4) – Completed.
  • Bright Side (1) – Completed.
  • Choose Your Own Adventure (1)
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses (4) – Completed.
  • Crazy Rich Asians (2)*
  • Dash and Lily (1)*
  • Disney’s Frozen (1)
  • The Gender Game (7) – Completed.
  • Hush, Hush (1)
  • Illuminae Files (1)*
  • Kitchen Princess (1)
  • Lisbon’s Misadventures (1)
  • Lux (3)*
  • Malory Family (1)*
  • Marked Men (2)*
  • Origin (1)*
  • The Raven Cycle (1)*
  • The Selection (1) – Completed.
  • Star Darlings (1)*
  • Uglies (5) – Completed.
  • The Vanderbeekers (1)
  • Warcross (1)*
  • Wayward Children (3)*
  • Xanth (2)*
  • You (1)*
• 65 books I own in some form vs. 50 books I borrowed or read as part of a subscription service (like Scribd or Kindle Unlimited).
• I re-read 7 books:
  • 100 Ghosts by Doogie Horner (Super cute Halloween read)
  • Jesus-Shock by Peter Kreeft (for A-Z challenge)
  • The Magic of You by Johanna Lindsey (Fave from teen years)
  • The Martian by Andy Wier (LOVE!)
  • Once and Always by Judith McNaught (LOVE!)
  • Xone of Contention by Piers Anthony (for A-Z challenge)
  • Zombie Lover by Piers Anthony (for A-Z challenge)
• 18 books published in 2018.

Thanks!

A big thank you to Kayla from Books and Lala, who inspired me to spend *hours* making this long-winded blog post for y’all! I’m tired, but happy to see all my reading stats for 2018!

If you’ve made it this far, you’re a rock star! Please link your blog/vlog posts in comments, so I can see your end-of-year wrap up!