Sunday Salon: 2014 stats

It would be remiss of me to not do a round up of my reading for 2014. Of course, that  also gives me yet another opportunity to lament how badly my 2014 reading really went.

Let's stop talking about what I didn't read and concentrate on what I did read.  I was quite pleased and a little surprised, to see that there were 15 books that I rated as being rated 4.5 or higher. There was only one book that I rated as a 5/5 read though.

And what an awesome book it was. Given that it was the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I it is fitting that the one book that I gave the maximum rating to was a book that explored that time. In Falling Snow by Mary-Rose MacColl follows a young woman who travels from Australia to look for her brother who has joined up despite the fact that he is underage. She becomes a nurse in a hospital in France. We follow both Iris's story as a nurse and her grand daughter Grace who works as a doctor but is having trouble balancing work with her role as a wife and mother. An excellent read on many levels.

So let's get stuck into some stats.

I only read a grand total of 66 books in 2014. 66!!  Last year I talked about the fact that I only read 219 books. Now I am thinking that 219 was a really good effort. I know for some people that 66 people would be a good total, but for me it is my worst reading year in at least 10 to 15 years. It is also important to put that in perspective.  As at June I had read 54 books. That means that in the last six months of the year I only read 12. And even that is a bit misleading because I only read one book in both November and December!

So I mentioned previously that in 2013 I was a bit disappointed with my total of 219 books and that was because the previous year I read a massive 291 books. I also could justify that a little because I read a lot of big books in 2013 but that isn't the case in 2014 either. All up, I read a total of 22696 pages. A fair proportion of the books I have read were by new to me authors - a total of 28.

Last year I was pretty much evenly split between reading in e-books and print with a good chunk being listened to in audio books. 2014 was different because I barely read any e-books and I pretty much stopped listening to audio books late in the year too. Or that is how it feels anyway. Let's have a look at the chart and see how it really was.

In terms of the quality of the books that I read, my go to grade continues to be 4/5, something that I don't envisage changing any time soon, but I as I mentioned above I was pleased that such a high proportion of them were 4.5 or 5 out of 5.

As usual, I continue to predominantly read books written by female authors. Given that this has been so consistent for a few years now I don't see this actually changing anytime soon.

My genre reading stayed pretty consistent with previous years. Romance tends to dominate with general fiction, historical fiction and YA. 

A few other little stats. 

My participation in the Australian Women Writers Challenge continues to influence my reading in a big way. This year, 24 of the books I read were by Australian female authors. It is hard to believe that it is only a couple of years since I was happy to just read 10 books by Aussie authors, regardless of gender! The only other challenge that I made any progress in was the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge where I read 12 books.

This year I reread 3 books. One of these was a surprise to me. I read a book which I didn't remember at all. It was only when I went to add it into my spreadsheet that I realised that it was already there!!

And there we have it. 2014 in a nutshell. Whilst I think that I will probably have the same kind of reading this year as I did last year I do hope that I can be a bit more consistent throughout the year rather than practically stopping reading at all in the latter part of the year.

Currently reading

Outback Ghost by Rachael Johns

Up Next

Lets just see if we can finish one book before we worry about the next one!!