Sunday Salon: 2021 in review

I do love a good graph, so it's always fun when we get to the end of a reading year and we look back to see what the patterns of our reading year are in graphical form.

In 2021 I set my Goodreads challenge total at 75, which unfortunately I didn't reach. I ended up with 53 books for the year, which I am happy with. It basically means I am tracking at a book a week. Gone are the heady reading years where I read more than 200 books in a year but this feels more balanced. And that is what I am striving for now in my life. In fact, balance is my word of the year for 2022! The biggest thing I need to balance is between work and home, but there are also a lot of things happening this year so there will be plenty of other things that I need to remember balance if I am not going to exhaust myself.

Anyway, enough about 2022. Let's focus back on the reading stats for 2021. There are a few surprises in amongst them, and then there are some expected results. The first of those is my tendency to read new books rather than back list. The oldest book I read was published in 1996, and that was a reread of Hogfather by Terry Pratchett.

Genre wise, there are no surprises that my reading is dominated by historical fiction, contemporary fiction and contemporary romance. If you had of told me 5 years ago that I would have a year when I would only read romance with a contemporary setting, I would have laughed. Back in the day I read all historical romance with an occasional contemporary set novel. These days, it's turned around completely. One thing that is slightly surprising it is that I read 4 sci-fi novels. I am generally not a sci-fi reader, but 3 of the Murderbot books in quick succession helped fill this number out!

My best reading month was August. Not sure why I got more reading done in that month, but I did!

One of the things that have changed for me over the last couple of years is the way that I read. If we look back a few years, most of my reading would have been paper books, then audio and then finally the occasional e-book. However, that has completely swapped around with the vast majority of my reads being digital this year. The fact that I only finished 3 audiobooks is representative of the fact that I spent most of my year working at home.

Some other stats:

I read 25 new to me authors in 2021, which is 47%. I think that is a good thing, but it also means I am not getting through many backlist books from authors I have already read. So I guess there are pros and cons both ways.

The authors who I did read multiple books by were Maggie Christensen with 6 books, Viola Shipman, Martha Wells and Ella Carey with 3 each and Susanna Kearsley and Maisie Thomas with 2 books.

I don't do a lot of rereads. This year I reread two books. One was The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley, one of my all time favourite books, and the other was The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. It is interesting that both of these were audiobooks that I listened to.

As always my reading is always skewed to read a lot more women authors than men. This year was no exception with 49 books by female authors and only 4 by males. However, 3 of those books were by Viola Shipman, who writes names under his grandmother's name, so if we were just looking at names, it would be one male author.

Another skew that I have in my reading is towards Australian authors. This year I read 41% of my reads were by Australian authors, which is a pretty big portion. I don't really see this changing.

The last graph I wanted to share is for ratings. My go to rating of a book I enjoyed is 4 out of 5 and this is once again reflected in the gradings for the year.

These were the four books that I gave 5/5 to!

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn (review) and 

The Warsaw Orphan by Kelly Rimmer

The Dressmakers of Yarrandarah Prison by Meredith Jaffe (review) and 

The Cartographer's Secret by Tea Cooper

I was going to add some Storygraph stats but they aren't really complete. Must do better on that this year. I also think this post is long enough without more!

So there is it is....my 2021 reading year in review!