This week I’ve shared my Reading Bingo post, my runner ups for books of the year, my favourite fiction of 2019 and my favourite nonfiction of 2019. Today it’s time to look back over my reading in 2019! I’ve used a spreadsheet for the last couple of years to track my reading, alongside Goodreads, and I love being able to see the breakdown of what I was reading over the year.

My Goodreads goal for 2019 was 200 books… I’m still not sure how it happened but in 2019 I read 375 books in total, which is the most books I’ve ever read in twelve months! I don’t expect to ever reach this number again but it has been wonderful to read so many books!

The longest book I read in 2019 was George Eliot’s Middlemarch – my edition had 923 pages! The shortest book I read was a recent read – The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore and had just 32 pages. I read quite a few longer books in 2019 but then over Christmas I read all my favourite festive reads which are short so that brought my page average down a little. I still averaged 345 pages per book though which I’m delighted about. It shows that overall I haven’t been reading short books just to attain a goal! According to Goodreads I read 127,454 pages in total in 2019!

 

The above picture shows all of my four and five star reads from 2019. It’s lovely to have read so many great books over a year. I have rated some books lower than that but I just wanted to show the books that I’ve really loved.

 

Alongside Goodreads I also track my reading on a spreadsheet and I do love seeing all my stats for the year.

Out of the 375 books I read in 2019 274 were by women and 94 were by men. The rest were co-authored by male and female authors. I don’t intentionally seek out books by female authors but ever since I’ve been tracking my reading on a spreadsheet it always works out that I’ve read more by women than men. I’m okay with this though and just find it interesting to note it.

I read fairly steadily through the year but April was a quieter month on the reading front, I’m not sure why. Then August was full of books and I had an incredible reading month!

I’m really pleased with the mix of genres that I read in 2019. It was definitely a year where I was very drawn to thrillers and I didn’t read as much nonfiction as I would have liked but overall I’m happy with the spread of genres my reading took.

I’m intrigued by the diversity of my reading and a little disappointed that I didn’t read more that was diverse. Having said that almost half of my reading counted as diverse and that is something! In 2020 I definitely want to read more about experiences outside of my own so this is something I will focus on a bit more in my reading.

The above pie chart shows the break down of where the books I read in 2019 were from. I made a real effort in the final quarter of last year to catch up on reading as many ARCs as I could so I’m really happy that the chart shows that half of my reading over the year were books from publishers directly or from NetGalley.

Alongside the above pie chart it seems right to share this one which shows what percentage of books I read where acquired in 2019 and which had been on my TBR for longer. It worked out that I read 238 of the books that I acquired in 2019 and 125 books that had been on my TBR before the start of the year. I also re-read 12 books last year. I did have quite a few ARCs that I’d owned since before the start of last year so I was really pleased to get those read and reviewed before the end of the year.

This chart shows the breakdown of where I acquired my books from in 2019. I wanted to share this chart really to show that whilst I am very lucky to receive books from publishers I do actually buy the majority of my books. I know Amazon is a problematic place to buy books but the vast majority of books I read are on my Kindle so it’s just the way it is for me. I joined my local library in the summer and whilst I can’t really use the actual library for borrowing books (the building isn’t accessible enough for me) I do love the BorrowBox app where I am now borrowing loads of audio books. I’m sure the percentage of borrowed books will increase in 2020!

I lost all control of my TBR in 2019 and gave up tracking it on my blog. I did still track it on my spreadsheet though so the above images show what happened…! I hoped to reduce my TBR a little each month but instead I increased it in all but one month. Oops! My TBR is now at 2618 (and this is books that I already own, it doesn’t include wish list books) so I have a lot of reading to do!

In terms of my blog I’ve had my best year in terms of number of posts. I managed to write 237 blog posts, which is the most I’ve ever managed to publish in a year. I feel like I finally got back to a place where I’m reviewing books quite soon after I read them rather than letting them build up and because of that I’m enjoying blogging so much more. I hope I can keep that up in 2020 and I’d also like to try and review every book that I read, even if it’s only a mini review.

On the 1st January 2019 I had the most ever views on my blog in a 24 hour period so that was a lovely way to start last year. I shared my favourite books of 2018 on that day and it was fab to share the book love and have people share their favourite books with me.

I was also thrilled beyond words to get an email from Reedsy in early October telling me that I’d made their list of Top 100 book bloggers for 2019. I’d been struggling a little with blogging when I got that email and it really gave me a boost to keep going and now I’m really back in the swing of things!

So all in all it’s been a wonderful year of reading for me in 2019 and I’m really excited to see what 2020 has in store.  I’m still pondering on what my plans are for blogging and reading in 2020 so I may write a post about that another day.

I hope 2019 was a fabulous reading year for you too! Happy New Year! 🙂