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2021 Reading Stats



Fixed. :)

maybe the stats take a while to update. Also those stats do not reflect omnibus or compilation books as I've read an additional 18 books. I'll stick with my spreadsheet


My longest book is Oathbringer and most popular Words of Radiance ;-)

My longest book is xkcd: Time at a ridiculous though accurate 3101 pages. No fixing that unless I read In Search of Lost Time by December 31st!
My highest rated on Goodreads is Stardew Valley Guidebook, which is a factor of my keeping game guides on Goodreads (or even insisting on caring about them at all), I know, but really?
And my first review of the year was for Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which says "Look I finally read it. A delight from start to finish. Review to come." (I guess I could fix that one LOL.) None of my best books this year are anywhere on this page, except for my reread of Annihilation as most popular. Just a trash fire!

I love that my average rating for the year so far having read more than 200 books is 3.2 stars.
Reading? Love it. The books? Not so much.
Reading? Love it. The books? Not so much.



I was surprised that my longest book was Lirael, which I reread recently. Didn't realise it was so long. Those 705 pages sure flew by.
My most popular? Project Hail Mary. No surprise, I suppose.
CBRetriever, when recording my books on GR I'm always unsure with book compilations, especially if I didn't read all books in the compilation. Usually I just 'cheat' by recording a read (of a different edition) of each separate book.
Compilations can be a handy money saver sometimes rather than buying each individual book, but I haven't read that many so it's not a big issue for me.

Highest rated though is a cute one - Wheel-Mouse vs All The Crazy Robots by Celyn Lawrence, daughter of Mark Lawrence. :D

If I don't read all of them, it goes on my Later shelf. The Delphi ones take so long (2+ years for the Complete Mark Twain) and The Complete Wheel of Time (15 books) took a long time (February to July) to complete. Anyway I have two columns in my spreadsheet:
Count of Books
Books in
so the Wheel of Time was: 1____14
and the Jake Grafton was: 1____3
.

Interviewer: And what are your weaknesses?
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it.
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it.

I thought my average 4.2 rating was over-generous. But I choose to consider it due to my prowess in choosing the really good books to read and skipping the others.

Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."
Hahahaha sounds about right.

I thought my average 4.2 rating was over-generous. But I choose to consider it due to my prowess in choosing the really good books to read and skipping the others."
I like to believe the books with potential 3/4 stars are on my currently reading or partially read shelves right now :)

Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."
<:D noooo! Don't give into the cynicism.

Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."
<:D noooo! Don't give int..."
Shall resist! : )

And, seeing how I've hardly peeked into it, that longest one's visibility on the list is a bit of an overkill: besides longest read, it's the Least Popular and Highest Rated on Goodreads :P (
Other than that, the page seems fine enough. Especially happy for the following gems to get highlighted:







(And The Dispossessed, of course, but this is not the first time and was rather calculated).

edit: Found it, cover added!"
Omg thanks! It was really irritating me since it was so obvious what the cover should have been. But I hate not using my book's ISBN for my reviews so I thought I would just have to deal with it.
Now I just need to find a less embarrassing highest rated on goodreads book to read lol

Shortest book: 13 pages (The Fox)
Longest book: 1318 pages (1Q84)

My Shortest: The Grownup, 64pgs
My Longest: Cyteen, 853pgs.
I am still reading a lot, but probably my average page length will not change much; right now it is at 265pgs, with 341 books completed. A LOT of those were murder mystery series books that were all ~200pgs long.
I do need to get back to finishing books though, I was ahead of my goal a few weeks ago by a lot, and now I'm behind by 5 books (!!!).

Amusingly I seem to be the only person to have that Genocide book. Probably just as well. Terrible topic, not very good book. Now I just need to find something less cliche for my most popular read.
I’m stoked to have reached a personal maximum number of books for many years though. Going to try to make it to 50 before the end of the year. Not sure if I’ll be able to beat that next year… given studies.


And then I got too enthusiastic about another reading project and went and f*cked things up again. I guess if there was ever a year in which Cthulhu deserved to be prominently featured on my YiB page, 2021 is it. So even though I have time to correct this, I won't.
(I am sad about losing Short Stories About Kittens, though, it was perfect!)

It was close 45-41 so nothing earth shattering but I am happy about it.
The non-white writing/perspectives I enjoyed the most were
Angie Thomas
Elizabeth Acevedo
Katie Mack
P. Djeli Clark
If I can quit my Tchaikovsky/Reynolds/Hamilton habit things should be better next year.

shortest 91 pages Eve in Hollywood
longest 878 pages To Sleep in a Sea of Stars though it felt like twice that long.
most popular The Midnight Library
highest rated What Could Possibly Go Wrong?


Format: 83% audio, 17% eye-reads
Length: 81% novels, 16% short fic, 3% graphic/illustrated
Age: 79% adult, 9% YA, 9%MG, 3% kids
Genre:
25% fantasy
23% scifi
9% other specfic
13% other
2% nonfic
15% mystery/thriller
13% romance
Authors:
16% cis men, 84% not cis men
56% white cishet able people, 44% people I want to read from
45% US, 19% UK/Ireland, 8% Australia/New Zealand, 3% Canada, 3% Malaysia/Singapore, 3% Finland, 2% other Nordic countries, 17% other
34% #ownvoices
8% translated + 3% Finnish
These stats are better than last year, but I dream of the day when I'm not adding "have to read" old white American dudes to these stats :/ But I wanted to read less than 50% US authors, and I did, and I want to continue doing that in 2022. I also want to keep books written in English to max 90%, although I wish I could do much better. I don't think it's realistic right now to aim much higher, but maybe I could get to 10% translated without having to rely on Finnish making up the difference?

I’m probably going to continue to read more older books than new ones, partly because there are lots of classics I want to read, and partly because I really want to make an impact on the TBR shelves and piles. However I think I’ll try to read more new things this year.

The average length ended up being 300 pages, yay for nice round numbers.
The most popular book I've read (at 7,4k shelved) was also my lowest-rated.
The least popular book I've read had exactly 0 other people reading it. Makes me feel like Indiana Jones going into a temple in search of treasure.

The only truly annoying thing about my GR year in books is that "highest rated" is for a book that I DNF'd, which was rated 4.8. Plus, though I usually rate my DNFs, I didn't in this instance since there were very few ratings and I didn't want to have a big negative impact.
Other stats I track:
Genre
scifi 44
fantasy 59
mystery 21
other fiction 3
non-fic 3
anthology/collections 7
Author stats
female 74
male 24
non-binary 2
authors of color 28
white authors 70
lgbtq+ authors 8
I started tracking author country this year (inspired by Anna) and US authors were more than 2x the authors from all other countries combined. So, for 2022 I'll work on reading more non-US authors as well as more non-cis-het-white authors.

The highest rated book I read is a poetry book that I gave 5 stars and so did the other 4 people who rated it.

Highest Rated = The Jake Grafton Collection: The Intruders, The Minotaur, Under Siege, and The Red Horseman. It was terrible and I almost DNF'd it
Shortest Read = Homesick by Lyn Venable at 10 pages which Amazon insists = 26 pages
Least popular = one of the Tor short story collections
93,267 pages read and 257 books read (this should be higher due to omnibus editions)
Books mentioned in this topic
Lord of Chaos (other topics)The Mountains of Mourning (other topics)
Homesick (other topics)
The Jake Grafton Collection: The Intruders, The Minotaur, Under Siege, and The Red Horseman (other topics)
The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Lois McMaster Bujold (other topics)Robert Jordan (other topics)
Stephen Coonts (other topics)
Lyn Venable (other topics)
Ru Emerson (other topics)
More...
See your own Goodreads stats here: 2021 Year in Books
I looked at mine for the first time in a while, and I feel like there's always something at the top that I wish wasn't there. Sigh. Last (?) year it was the shortest book, now it's the longest. Do I really need to read a 900 page book just so that I don't have that stat forever staring at me on my YiB page? I do have a book that would do, but I don't know if I'm in the mood to read it now.
Funniest stat is definitely the least popular book, which is Short Stories About Kittens :D
But the thing I really wanted to talk about is the vague goal I sort of publicly set myself in January. I said I wanted to read less than 50% US authors, and at least 10% translated fiction. I haven't looked at any stats at all in months, but I looked today, and I am definitely going to achieve both of these even if I only read US authors in December. I'm currently at about 42% US and 10% translated + 3% Finnish which, although not translated, is not English, so I kind of count it.
If anyone else is like me and feels the need to "fix stats" before the end of the year, now is the time to start (panicking) !