2018: My Reading Stats
I read a lot of books this year. 153 books, to be exact, which comes out to about 3 per week and an average of 13 per month. I wasn’t trying to beat 2017’s number of 135, but I did. My lowest month this year was February with five books, because I watched the Olympics each night instead of reading, and my highest month was December with 20 books completed because I took eleven days off work (hallelujah). I read most of my 2018 books in Georgia. But I also read some in Tennessee, some in Mississippi, some in Alabama, some in South Carolina, some in North Carolina, some in Alaska, some in Vancouver, and some in Seattle. The first book I read this year was Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott (a reread), and the last book I read this year was Reign the Earth by A. C. Gaughen.
I didn’t do a Goodreads challenge. I’m terrible at having hobbies because I’m super competitive and ambitious. So I want reading to be the one thing in my life where I don’t put pressure on myself and can just truly enjoy it. And I do enjoy it… as is evidenced by the fact that I read 153 books in 2018 without even trying! But the downside of not doing a Goodreads challenge is that I have to compile my reading data myself at the end of the year. So, here are a few rudimentary pie charts showing some of my 2018 reading statistics.
Let’s start out with how many fiction books I read versus how many nonfiction books I read. My prediction: I wasn’t sure of exact numbers, but I knew I read much more fiction than nonfiction this year, and I was right.
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As far as rereads versus books that I read for the first time, I read a ton of new books this year, and I didn’t think there would be that many rereads. And I was right again! When I was younger, I used to think (and I’m sure my mom used to think) that I would run out of books to read one day, but now I know the truth… I’ll never have enough time to read all the books in the world.
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Out of the fiction books I read this year, I also wanted to analyze how many YA, MG or children’s, and adult books I read. I accurately predicted that I read the most YA books by far. These stats are as close as I can figure…
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Finally, genre-wise, my initial guess was that I read the most contemporary this year. I used to not think I liked contemporary, but I absolutely fell in love with it this year and read a heck ton of contemporary. I was interested to see how the other genres panned out!
I did have a little trouble sorting some books into genres for this chart. A lot of them overlapped–for instance, many of the autobiographies I read were by missionaries or pastors and could just as easily have gone into faith-based. And since several MG/children’s books I read don’t exactly slot into a category, I just made a general children’s lit section. So the lines blur a little, but this is pretty accurate. I was right that I read the most contemporary this year, but fantasy and dystopian/sci-fi came pretty close! Things were pretty even across the board with genres, which makes for a very pretty pie chart.
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Overall, 2018 was a really, really good reading year. I’m not going to divide books up into favorites/non-favorites or give any specific reviews because that’s a lot of work haha (hit up my Goodreads for somewhat coherent reviews), but I loved the large majority of the 153 books I read. I love the idea that all of these stories are part of me now, shaping the way I write and the way I look at the world. So excited to devour more books in 2019!
How many books did you read in 2018? What genre did you read the most? What were some of your favorite reads?
