My 2021 Reading Stats
Hi everyone!
There is no denying now that we are firmly in the year 2022, but before I share with you my goals for this year I would like to take a final look back at 2021. Many of the books mentioned in this post I also talked about in our Season 2 Bonus Episode but I also wanted to put together some more statistics.
When Corrie and I started our podcast and created our Instagram account, I must admit that I had very little contact with the book community outside of a few of my avid reader friends. I was also completely unaware of the wealth of bookish merchandise out there or of the fact that one could have a book journal. I was pretty good at keeping my Goodreads page up to date in terms of reading progress, but I wanted to get a bit more creative.
I have always been a goal oriented person and as a scientist I like how a large amount of data can be represented in a graph, so it will probably come as no surprise that my book journal is full of spreads like the one below.
How I keep track of my reading every day
I will make a separate post about what the rest of my book journal looks like, but for now let’s focus on how my reading went in 2021. I am not a fast reader and I very rarely listen to audiobooks, plus I like it when things rhyme, so at the beginning of last year I decided to set what I thought was a pretty realistic goal of reading 21 books in 2021 (in 2020 I had managed 25 books).
January and February of last year I was on personal leave from work and so with nothing really to occupy my time, I dived straight into books and managed to read 8 books in just those two months! I was pretty pleased with myself, I’m not gonna lie, but I honestly didn’t think that this would be sustainable once I went back to work. I felt like I needed extra motivation to keep reading and a way of keeping myself accountable so I reached out to Corrie and asked if she would be interested in doing a bookish podcast (spoiler alert - she graciously accepted).
I smashed my reading goal in July of 2021 and by the end of the year, I had read a personal record of 51 books (plus 6 graphic novels which I have chosen not to count towards this goal, even though Goodreads does).
I was really curious to break this number down a bit more and so created a dedicated End of Year Review spread in my journal.
My 2021 Reading Stats
My End-of-year Review spread
My 51 books read in 2021
Let me throw some numbers at you:
Of the 51 books I read last year, only 10 were physical books and the rest were e-books.
I read a total of 19,374 pages and I did so over 268 days!
I read the most pages in February (2,400 to be exact) but the most books in October (7 in total).
October was also when I read the most 5* books (4).
24 books were for the podcast and the rest were a combination of e-ARCs (6), books from my TBR (7), a bookbox feature (1) and a category I unhelpfully called others (13).
I rated only one book 1*, the majority of the books I read were 4*.
The longest book I read was “Lethal White” and came in at 774 pages.
“Christmas Day in the Morning” was the shortest book with only 32 pages (according to Goodreads, the unillustrated e-book I actually read was 4 pages).
I am honestly amazed at what I accomplished last year and also proud of myself for branching out of my comfort zone and reading books from genres and by authors I wouldn’t normally go for. While I still gravitate most towards fantasy, I also discovered contemporary romantic comedies in 2021 and they were some of the best books I read, as were the two translated Japanese books we read for the podcast (“Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata and “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi).
I am so excited to continue my reading journey this year and am curious to see if last year was a fluke or if I can read 50 books. As I write this, I have managed 4 books so I am on track.
Until next time, keep reading!
~ Lucia