Reading Wrap Up – A Bookish Life

Hi all and a happy new year,

I hope you’re all happy, healthy and looking forward to the start of a New Year, I know I am as 2022 has been a difficult year for me. There’s been a lot of change and uncertainty, a ton of work stress and I lost my horse Charlie unexpectedly during the Summer. Needless to say I was not wholly successful in meeting my reading, or blogging goals for the year. I was probably even more of a mood reader than usual and nice, uplifting comfort reads were very much my go to reads for a lot of the time. I did however manage to track my reads (mostly) for the year, thank you Storygraph, so I thought why not do a reading wrap up of 2022 using some of their graphs.

My 2022 Reading in Graphs

At the start of 2022 I decided to try using Storygraph to track my reads and honestly I’m finding it so much better than Goodreads. It doesn’t have the same community that Goodreads has, yet, but it’s much better in terms of adding/finding books, tracking your progress against reading challenges and producing stats in the form of graphs that you can slot into a blog post 🙂 Every year I set up a spreadsheet to track my reads with the intention of doing some graphs of my reading (I work with numbers so love a graph) and by around the second week of January the spreadsheet has been abandoned. Storygraph has therefore been a godsend, so much so that I’m very tempted to move to “Plus” so I can get some more stats and graphs (I’m currently using the free version). So what do the graphs say about my reading in 2022?

1. Books/Pages Read – 112 books / 39,355 pages

I set my target for the year at 100 books and 35,000 pages but managed to finish a total of 112 books, reading just over 39,000 pages. Work tends to be super busy at the start and end of the year and a little quieter in spring and summer, so the number of books finished in a month ranged from a low of 5 in December to a high of 14 in April. The months with higher reads are also the ones where I was taking part in team reading challenges with Uno running from February to April and Tower Teams from mid May to August.

2. Average Rating – 3.79 Stars

Despite reading 112 books I seem to have only rated 110, no idea what the missing two are and I’m too lazy to check. One of the things I love about Storygraph is that you can give quarter and half stars. I want my books to be pretty much perfect before I’ll give them the full 5 stars so it’s great to have the option for 4.5 and 4.75 stars for those books I loved but weren’t perfect. I ended up only giving 4 books the full 5 stars with 6 getting 4.75 stars and 9 at 4.5 stars. Expect a separate post soon on my favourite reads of the year. The majority of books were around the 4 star mark so despite a couple of truly bad reads (I blame booktok) I’d say most of my books were enjoyable ones.

3. Mood – Mostly uplifting, light hearted books

I’m not entirely sure how accurate the “Mood” categorisations are on Storygraph and I’m pretty sure books appear on this more than once (a single book could be lighthearted, funny and relaxing for example) but I think this does sum up the majority of my reads this year. I was definitely leaning into the easy, uplifting and comforting books this year although there were a few dark and tense reads in there too

4. Most Read Genre / Authors

Given the main moods of my reads over the last year it should be no surprise that Romance and Contemporary were the main genres read this year. Again I’m pretty sure books are double counted and pop up in more than one genre

Given my main genres are romance and contemporary, it’s probably not a shock that 8 of my 10 most read authors write books that are heavy on the romance, with only Martha Wells and Lucy Foley the exceptions. Tessa Bailey and Bea Paige were new authors to me this year. I ended up going on a bit of a series binge with Bea Paige and Ilona Andrews which is why both appear so highly on the list. Tessa Bailey has become a new favourite author so it’s likely she’ll pop up on next year’s list too.

5 Other Stats

I don’t read a lot of non fiction so for four of my books this year to be non fiction is actually a big increase compared to previous years when I’ve maybe managed one or two. Of the four books two were memoirs, one was self help (I think) and the other was travel

Again this one is not really a shock to me. I set my target of 35,000 pages based on 100 books with an average of 350 pages as that tends to be roughly the length of the majority of the books I read. I tend to avoid longer books so I’m not shocked that only 2 books had over 500 pages. I am slightly surprised by how many of my reads this year had less than 300 pages but I guess between Murderbot, a few novellas and shorter romance reads it’s about right.

I haven’t had much focus over the last year (or possibly ever) so slower paced books tend to be a bit of a struggle for me. I wish I had the concentration for them as I know there are some real gems I’m missing out on but every time I try to read a slower paced book I almost always end up having to reread sections or generally avoiding the book.

Overall I’m pretty happy with my reading over the last year. Would I have liked to read more translated fiction, longer books, a larger mix of genres? Yes. But there were times when I was just happy I was managing to read anything and actually enjoying reading. There were some not great books in there but there were some brilliant books in there too. I discovered quite a few new authors, read a few books that were out of my comfort zone, discovered I like memoirs and supported debut authors and indie bookshops.

All in I’m saying it was a good reading year. Here’s hoping 2023 is even better.