Jaq’s Year in Books

Check out My 2018 Year in Books on Goodreads.

I didn’t do too bad this year. Originally, I had set my goal at 80 books, then upped it to 100. Eventually, I topped out at over 120.

Now here’s some interesting stats:

Sex of Author:

Female – 44%Author Sex.png

Male – 56%

I had joined a group on Facebook in an effort to read more female authors, and I can certainly say I did. While I didn’t quite hit 50%, whenever possible, I did choose someone who wasn’t of my gender. This allowed me to read some books I’d been dying to read for a while and at the same time, I discovered a number of new authors and classics I’d never gotten around to reading before.

Type of Binding:Binding.png

Audiobook – 44%

E-book – 49%

Physical copy – 7%

While I enjoy physical copies of books, I find reading e-copies much more convenient. As for audiobooks, Audible.com is my friend and I highly recommend their service. To be honest, though, I thought I had read more physical copies. This is something I hope to rectify in the coming year.

Ratings:

1 star – 1%

2 stars – 3%ratings.png

3 stars – 22%

4 stars – 50%

5 stars – 24%

This one was also interesting to me. It seems that 4 stars is my default rating (i.e. it delivers what I expect) – if it’s exemplary it gets +1 and if it’s not as good, -1. Takes quite a bit to fall below that threshold for me. To be honest, the 1 star books on here, I didn’t finish (I did, however, look up the ending to see if I was right about where it was going – I was). Next year I’m going to try to be a bit more discerning and not have as many 5 stars. Maybe make 3 stars the default and go up or down from there.

Genre:

Graphic Novels/Comics – 32%Genre.png

Young Adult – 2%

Mystery/Thriller/Horror – 11%

SF/Fantasy – 34%

Non-Fiction – 17%

Literature – 4%

This category is the hardest to define and so I went with broad strokes and no overlapping. Basically, the biggest category which could define the book, that’s what I chose. This is an imperfect method, to be sure, but it works for what I want to see. A good portion of my reading this year was graphic novels/comic books (and again, here this could also be an umbrella terms with secondary characteristics which could fall under almost any of the other classifications) and a good number of these I read as prep for teaching. However, getting back into the groove of reading comics, I started picking up more and reading them for fun. Certainly, these upped my total book count as one could be read in an evening or two while an audiobook (even at 1.5x speed) could take up to 20 hours to listen to while reading a book could also be hours of time accumulated over several days nighttime reading.  Only two qualified strictly as YA books while speculative fiction remains the bulk of my pleasure reading. I will say, though, that non-fiction is making a huge leap forward.

Additionally, I like to follow along on reading challenges. The PopSuger one has been pretty fun for the last few years so I’ll be doing it again this year. Feel free to join me. Of course, I might also take a look through the list of challenges offered by girlxoxo – I think it’s the most comprehensive list I’ve ever seen.

As always, you can also be my friend on Goodreads, ask me for a recommendation (I’m really going to try and get back to my Thursday reviews), or just enjoy your own reading time. See you in the pages!

Categories: Books, Personal, Reviews | Tags: , , | 9 Comments

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9 thoughts on “Jaq’s Year in Books

  1. If I want to reach my 2018 goal (which was a small one – 12 books, supposedly one each month), I need to read and finish 3 books in 3 days. Totally doable, right? 😀
    Reading challenges are absolutely fun, but my “to be read” pile is already a mountain, so I should be cracking on that one first before taking any challenges, I think.

    • The way I do challenges is I read what I want to read and then see if it fits into the challenge somewhere. It’s a bit backwards, but it works for me.

      As for 3 books in 3 days, of course you can. Just make them short books 😀

      • Yeah, Calamity reads quickly and easily (did 60/400 pages without even much thinking), but for the other two I’ll probably need to resort to cheating and do something like… picking up Myth Adventures series that I had decided to drop, cause those are only 150 per book or so.

        As for challenges, yeah, I get the backwards method, but for me personally those are usually when I don’t know what to read specifically. Or perhaps make/find a veeeery long one and make that 2019-onwards-for-life one.

      • I love the Myth books! Graphic novels are also good.

  2. Did one cheatty one (though it was on my TBR list), but then decided I’d rather just have fun all around than try to cram couple books in couple days and just accept that I did not reach this goal, and try again next year. I was close, and that’s fine enough for now.

  3. Pingback: 2018 Year in Review | Getting the Hang of Thursdays

  4. Pingback: Beat the Backlist 2019 Hogwarts Mini Challenge | NovelKnight | Getting the Hang of Thursdays

  5. Pingback: Jaq’s Year in Books – 2019 edition | Getting the Hang of Thursdays

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