I’m continuing my “Best of 2020” posts with my favorite one to compile: my reading stats for 2020! As a reminder, I keep track of my reading using a spreadsheet. I fill in the book title, author, publication year, reading dates, rating, where I got the book from, etc. because I love keeping track of my stats and sharing them on the blog! Let’s take a look at what 2020 looked like in my reading life:
Nitty-Gritty Details
- Number of books read: 153 (+23 from 2019)
- Number of pages read: 51,219 (+5,871 from 2019)
- Money spent on books I read this year: $472.41 (+39.25). This amounts to $3.09 per book.
- Percentage of books by and about BIPOC and the LGBTQIA+ community: 45, or 29% (+11% from 2019)
- Number of books abandoned: 11 (+1 from 2019)
Format Breakdown
E-book reading was up and audiobooks were down—seems par for the course for 2020! Print was down by 5% from 2019, e-books were up by 9% (!), and audiobooks were down by 7%.
Genre Breakdown
No surprise here! Romance was my most-read genre for another year in a row, although my romance reading was down by 2% from 2019. I read the exact same number of contemporary fiction and nonfiction books in 2020—crazy! My fiction reading was down by 12% from 2019 while nonfiction was up by 7%. I read more historical fiction (+3%), mystery/thrillers (+4%), and YA (+.9%) this year.
Source Breakdown
As always, the library leads the way in where most of my books came from in 2020—61%, which is identical to last year! This year, I read slightly more books from Libby (ebooks, +4%) and slightly less from the library (print books, -4%). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that discrepancy is due to the library being closed/at limited capacity for most of the year. As far as non-library reading goes, Amazon comes in first (-2% from 2019), followed by bookstores (no change from 2019) and Book of the Month (+1% from 2019). Rounding out the list are books that were gifted to me, books won in giveaways, and the Serial Reader app.
Month Breakdown
Pretty steady across the board! I never read less than 11 books in a month and my biggest month of reading was in June when I read 15 (!) books.
Ratings Breakdown
I rated 62% of my books 4 or 5 stars, which is down slightly from 2019 by 4%. My 3-star ratings stayed about the same, my 2-star ratings rose by 4% (maybe I was more comfortable rating something 2 stars this year?), and my 1-star ratings stayed about the same.
Days to Read
This was just something fun I like to track—how long it takes me to finish books! Since I’m often reading multiple books at once, it wasn’t too surprising that most books take me 3-8 days to finish. It’s rare for me to finish a book within 1-2 days, but it happens!
New Releases vs Backlist
For the first time, I started tracking how many new releases I read vs backlist titles, and this seems pretty typical for me! I do not shy away from backlist (a lot of the romances I read are backlist) and it shows in this chart.
Publishing Years
I read a ton of books published in 2019 and 2020—comprised almost half my reading! I guess I’m a sucker for the new titles everyone is talking about, heh.
Odds and Ends
- Oldest book (by pub date): Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
- Newest book (by pub date): Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas (October 6, 2020)
- Author I read the most: Tessa Dare (6 books)
- Book I spent the most money on: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi ($24.30)
- Time spent listening to audiobooks: 72 hours, 58 minutes (but since I listen at 1.5x or 1.75x speed, my actual listening time is much less than that!)
- Longest book: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (864 pages)
- Shortest book: Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott (102 pages)
- Book that took me the longest to read: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (162 days)
That is a fun break down! I used to track my reading in a spreadsheet but got so far behind and stopped doing it as it just didn’t become a habit. But it’s cool you’ve done this for years and can see trends. I am sure I read more ebooks, too, since they were easier to get during a pandemic and now that I have a baby that trend will continue.
I totally geek out about stuff like this too, so you’d better believe I loved reading this!
What a phenomenal reading year, at least by the numbers (although it sounds like the quality was pretty good, too!)
Here’s to another great reading year in 2021 <3
I love all of your separate breakdowns! I only use goodreads numbers, but those can be exported so I could do a deeper dive, but I have not done it yet. All of my books were from the library, except for maybe 10 that were already owned or borrowed from friends! However I do think it would be fun to see the genre and average time spent reading etc. and it was definitely fun to see your stats!
Loved seeing the breakdown but not gonna lie: I keep coming back to the point where you read 153 books! That’s amazing, girl haha. I am always so impressed with how many books you manage to read. I feel lucky if I get close to 50 most years!
I was going to say, wow, you read a lot of non-fiction! That’s awesome it was up this year! (Personal side note – I used to only read non-fiction which is why I probably read so little – I read those slower!)
Ooo! Seeing new releases vs backlist is fun! I might track that too. Aren’t backlists great? Ahhh. Love them. As you know I went on my TJR backlist adventure at the end of 2020.
I love that your oldest book is from 1877! Will the Count of Monte Cristo be your oldest for 2021? We shall see! 🙂
I love stats and love looking at these graphs! Your reading impresses me every year!
I’m absolutely a sucker for the new titles everyone’s talking about! I love how closely you track your reading stats; I think this breakdown is fascianting.