In 2017, according to Goodreads, I read 103 books (up on a total of 91 last year). I'm saying this to brag, obviously, but hopefully not to make anyone feel bad about their own acheivements - if you read five books or a hundred and fifty-five books, that's awesome. Books are awesome and we should all celebrate that they've been a part of our lives this year.
I kept a spreadsheet as well as updating Goodreads (because why wouldn't you want a spreadsheet?) and have finangled some statistics out of it:
By genre, Young Adult predominated again (39 books) although not as much as last year, with Proper Grown-Up Literary Fiction coming in second (15 books). I've been trying to read a few smart, grown-up books, mostly to prove that I can. I'm still not convinced they're better than kids' books.
Sci-fi was third, with 8 books. There's been some stellar (har) sci-fi this year.
I managed 13 Non-Fiction books (great improvement from last year) and 2 graphic novels (rather shabby effort).
By author gender, it's about 50-50 female-male, which surprised me because I deliberately try to bias my reading towards women authors. More shockingly, despite my stated promise to read more diversely, only about 15% of my 2017 reading was by authors who weren't white and/or CIS-gendered.
I'm still reading very few books on my Kindle - a grand total of 8 this year. And I seem to have gotten over my brief dalliance with audiobooks.
About a quarter of the novels I read this year were by authors I was already a fan of (or who I thought deserved another chance at converting me). Which means I tried about 75 books by authors I'd never read before. 28 were random selections from the local libraries (and a couple were direct recommendations by our lovely librarians). Another 15 were either recommended by friends or I tracked them down because of positive buzz online. Word of mouth is alive and well! Oh, and 7 books were by our visiting Litfest authors, because I need to keep my fangirling up to date.
Next year, I intend to continue discovering new authors and not understanding literary fiction. I will read more diversely, dammit. And I also intend to properly update my Goodreads account, because I've just started reading the same Douglas Coupland book for what I suspect is the third time.
