Happy New Year! Over the last few days I’ve shared my favourite novels read in 2021, my favourite non-fiction read in 2021, and my Reading Bingo posts so today it’s time for my reading statistics post! I love going through my Goodreads, Storygraph and my spreadsheet to see the patterns in my reading and I hope you enjoy reading this post.

2021 was a much better reading year for me than 2021 and I found that my books gave me the escapism and solace that I needed from them.

I’m really happy that I read 265 books in 2021. I feel like this is a normal pace of reading for me so it was good to have something that felt normal in a world that still feels upside down.

The longest book I read in 2021 was The Romanovs at 784 pages and it was such a fascinating read, I’m so glad that I finally picked it up. My shortest read was my annual re-read of The Night Before Christmas with just 32 pages.

This chart is the breakdown of genres that I’ve read in 2021. It doesn’t surprise me that general fiction and thrillers make up the biggest chunks on the chart as I mostly read for escapism and I am happy that I found books that provided me with that when reality has been so stressful at times. I’m sad that, like last year, I didn’t read as much non-fiction as I usually do. When you add non-fiction, memoir and true crime together they make up around a quarter of my reading, which isn’t bad but I would have liked it to have been more like a third or even half. I hope to rectify this in 2022 but I’m not going to pressure myself as just reading at all is the important thing for me.

I don’t ever choose books by the gender of the author but every year I read more books by women than men, and the percentage always seems to fall around three quarters. I’m happy with this stat.

This chart is no real surprise to me as I pick my Kindle up way more than a print book these days. I have problems with my vision in one eye so being able to change the size of the font and the colour of the screen is vital to me. Also being disabled a Kindle is so much easier to hold than a book. I am surprised that the percentage of audio books isn’t higher as I feel like I listen to a lot of audio books but I think I maybe listen to longer books on audio and so they take longer to get through.

This chart shows how I acquired the books I actually read this year. I’m really pleased that my ARC number is as high as it is as I’ve been really focused on reading my way through my NetGalley shelf. I did really well but right before Christmas I requested more books so now have fifteen to read and review but that feels like a manageable number. I’m also very happy that I read nearly as many books that I either bought myself or was given as a gift as I really wanted to make more effort to read books I own and to balance that with books for review.

To balance the previous chart this one shows how I’ve been acquiring books over 2021 and I’m very pleased that the biggest section by a long way is purchased. I love getting advanced copies of books to read and review but it’s so important to support authors by buying their books too and I’m pleased that I’ve been doing this.

I debated whether to share this chart because I’m a little bit ashamed but I want to hold myself accountable so here it is. The blue bars are the number of books I read every month in 2021 and the red bars are the number of books I bought in 2021. As is very glaringly apparent the numbers aren’t even close to balancing! Ooops! Towards the end of the year I decided to have a huge clear out of my print books, Kindle books and Audio books though and I literally halved my book collection so overall that’s a win in terms of the size of my TBR. In 2022 I really want to read more of the books that I owned before this year so that’s my aim. I’ll still be buying books and requesting on NetGalley but I want to make sure that now I’ve sorted my books down to only the ones I still want to read that I actually do make a start on reading them.

So to hold myself accountable… the total number of books I own is 2192! 145 are print books, 312 are audio books and the other 1735 are Kindle books. Obviously I own way more books than I can read in a year but I’d like to make a decent dent in the number I own before the end of 2022.

So that’s 2021 in statistics and some plans for 2022! I love seeing how my reading breaks down over a year and spotting patterns, it helps me see what I want to aim for in the coming year. Do you like looking back on your reading?

Happy New Year!