more books what I read in 2016

Thanks to the wonder of my reading spreadsheet, I can bring you further details of what I read last year. I know, you're spoilt.

In total I read 91 books. Breaking that down into genre first:

Almost exactly half (44) were Young Adult, which is no surprise because a) I'm trying to write YA books at present so need to keep up to date, and b) because OMG it's the best genre. It bears repeating that in the broad category of YA, you've got the whole spectrum of genres - crime, horror, thriller, literary, sci-fi, fantasy, everything. I tried to read as variously as possible, aided by my random-selection process (see below).
I also read 9 Middle Grade books (as categorised by my local library), 7 sci-fi, 6 "literary" (judged by me as such, usually because they didn't fit into another convenient category), 4 thrillers, 3 women's fiction, 2 crime, 2 horror, 2 fantasy, 2 poetry compilations, and 1 historical romp. Also 4 non-fiction books and 5 graphic novels.

(This isn't including all the children's books I read with my Youngest, although to be honest a few of those were for me more than him.)

By author gender, it's pretty much a 60-40% split female-male.

Despite the hundreds of ebooks I'd acquiring on my Kindle, I only read 5 ebooks and listened to 2 audiobooks

I also kept track of the reasons why I picked up a particular book, mostly for my own curiosity. 30 of the books were by authors I'd previously read. Which means a solid two-thirds were by authors I'd never read anything by before. And it paid off, because I discovered some of my new favourite authors this year.
Of the rest, 14 books were random selections from the library. I absolutely judge a book by its cover - it's the only way, since I hate reading blurbs (I've had to stop reading tag lines on the cover as well, due to the number of books that think "you'll never guess the surprise twist at the end" is a) not a spoiler, and b) likely to make me do anything but put the bloody thing straight back on the shelf). For a few months I choose books based on cover colour (there're a lot of blue books right now, I noticed). I tried not to limit myself by genre, although obviously there's a YA bias.
13 books were directly recommended to me, either online or in person.
21 were books I'd heard mentioned on Twitter or in the Bookseller or somewhere else.
7 were for authors who attended Manx Litfest 2016, where I wanted to effectively fan-girl at them.

So looking towards 2017... I should read more non-fiction. And I've seriously neglected the crime and horror genres. Oh, and I should read more ebooks. Apart from that, I think I'll just read everything.