Over the last few days I’ve shared my Reading Bingo 2020, my favourite novels read in 2020 and my favourite non-fiction read in 2020 posts so today it’s time for my reading statistics post!

2020 was such an awful and strange year and my reading has been very up and down. I did read at my normal pace up until February and then I was too anxious to read. I then started to read again but hit an awful reading slump around September/October and I’m only just starting to feel like reading again now. So I almost didn’t bother doing a reading stats post this year but I do enjoy putting the post together so I decided to go ahead anyway.

My original goal for this year was to read 275 books but I dropped that to 210 in the summer. I did manage to achieve the goal with a total of 215 books read in 2020. Quite a few of my more recent books were very, very short though so if I’d stuck to 300+ page novels I wouldn’t have read anywhere near as many books.

The longest book that I read in 2020 was Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman which is a whopping 1032 pages long. I loved the book and am so pleased that I took the time to read it over the summer. The shortest book I read was A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles M. Schulz at just 32 pages long. My average page count was 317, which is short for me but not too bad. According to Goodreads I read a total of 68,268 pages over the year.

Alongside Goodreads I track my reading and blogging stats on a spreadsheet and I just love seeing all the charts and seeing the patterns in my reading.

Of the 215 books I read in 2020 153 were by women, 54 were by men and three were co-authored by a woman and a man. I don’t seek out books based on the author’s gender but ever since I’ve tracked my reading on a spreadsheet I’ve read far more books by women than men. I am totally fine with this but still find it fascinating how it almost always naturally breaks down to two thirds or even three quarters women.

Usually I read quite steadily throughout the year but this year has been a bit all over the place as you can see from the chart above. I struggled to read in March, mainly before the lockdown happened as my anxiety was through the roof. I then began to feel calmer and stopped watching so much of the news and over the summer when I could spend time out in the garden I read quite a lot. Since the end of September my reading has tailed off a lot. It looks like I read a lot in December but to be honest most of those books were my really short cosy Christmas books that I read most years so the page count was pretty tiny. I’m okay with how my reading has been this year though because 2020 was such an horrendous year.

I read quite a variety of genres this year so I’m happy about that. I’m a bit sad that I didn’t read anywhere near as much nonfiction as I normally do but when I was reading I mainly wanted escapism so I mostly reached for novels.

The above pie chart breaks down where I got the books that I read through 2020. I’m really pleased that 44.8% of the books I read were books I had for review as it means my plan to make a dent in the pile of ARCs has been reasonably successful. I also used the BorrowBox app (my local library app for audiobooks) a lot more so am happy that I’m supporting library services and am trying books I might otherwise not have read too.

This pie chart shows where I acquired my books from in 2020. Almost two thirds of my books are ones that I bought for myself and only a quarter of books were ARCS, I’m really pleased about this. I love getting ARCs but I also want to support authors so want to buy books as much as I can.

I’ve been tracking how much of my TBR from pre- the beginning of 2020 to see how many of those books I’ve read versus how many books I bought and read in 2020. The above chart shows the break down. I’m really pleased with this chart. I love that it shows I’m reading a lot of books in the year I buy them whilst also still reading older books. I do think I need to try to buy fewer books and to read more of my existing TBR but I never stick to this kind of plan! In 2021 I would like to make re-reading some of my favourite books more of a priority. I always mean to go back to old favourites but I have so many unread books on my TBR mountain that I always go to those first. I would, as a minimum, like to re-read Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone this year. It’s a really special book to me and I haven’t re-read it in a few years now.

The above chart shows the formats of the books I read in 2020. In some ways I was surprised that the percentage of ebooks I read was so much higher than the audio books I listened to but then with my husband being furloughed I didn’t listen to as many books over the year. I wish I had managed to read more hardback and paperback books as my physical book TBR keeps on growing but a lot of the time I struggle to physically hold them and turn the pages so I just read them as and when I can. I would like to read more of my physical books this year if I can.

So that’s it, my 2020 reading year in statistics! I’ve got a spreadsheet started for 2021 so I’m tracking my reading again this year.