2018 Reading in Review

Happy new year everyone, and welcome back to my blog! I’m super excited to write this post, because I love looking back at the year and I love stats and numbers. In 2018 I achieved my Goodreads reading challenge and read a total of 42 books! It’s a great achievement for me personally, but more importantly are the quality of the books I read. Definitely check out my 2017 year wrap up as well because I will often compare my numbers from that post to this one.

In this post I won’t be discussing with you my favourite books of the year… I will make a separate post for that!

The Statistics

Books read: 42

Total pages read: 13,367

Average rating: 3.76

Similarly to last year I read a majority of female-identifying authors, with a 2% increase from 63% in 2017. I definitely plan to increase this ratio in 2019 by consciously picking up more women authors!

As seen in my average ratings and in this graph, I was mostly very generous with my reading, with a high amount of 4-star books and 3-stars, and zero 1-star reads. I feel like I read a huge amount of okay books last year, with several highlights which of course I will talk about later in my post of favourite books of the year.

These two stats were also quite interesting to observe for my reading habit in 2018. I saw that I’ve been reading a quarter of my books in the form of audiobook, while reading a little bit less ebooks of 33% compared to 2017 where I read 32% of my books in the form of ebooks. Of course keeping in mind that in 2017 I have not started my Audible account, therefore reading no audiobooks.

Meanwhile I also started a library subscription and a NetGalley account in 2018, changing the sources of where I obtained my books. In the next graph you can see that though most of the books I read were books I own, I also read almost a quarter of my reading from my ARCs. I definitely like this number and want to keep it in this ratio, while maybe increasing the amount of books I read from the library.

This graph is another one of my favourites to observe, which is my genres! I definitely read a huge range of genres over the year as usual. In 2017 the difference between each genre isn’t as obvious as this one – mysteries and literary fiction definitely has a huge role in my reading in 2018, with memoirs quickly becoming a favourite genre.

Here you can see the amount of books I read per month, and we can definitely see a huge inconsistency, but what is life without some ups and downs, eh? Also I did not consider the amount of pages I read per month, cause in this graph you cannot see how large the books I read per month. I definitely read less in May and June because of my final paper and graduating and consequently vacationing, with another dip in November. I read a maximum of 5 books a month, making an average number of one book finished per week.

But of course length of the books I read is also important, and I made a graph of that as well. It’s obvious that I read mainly 300-400 paged books, which is quite an increase since 2017, only 35% of my books are in that page range. I definitely want to read bigger books and maybe I’ve been less intimidated with longer books this year.

The Books

Worst books of the year

Her Final Hour | She was the Quiet One | Twist of Faith

Books that made me cry

Little Fires Everywhere | Born a Crime | I Am, I Am, I Am | Our Homesick Songs | Stay With Me

Longest books

Royal Assassin | The Casual Vacancy

Well, these are all the highlights of my reading year in 2018! I had a lot of fun making graphs and making conclusions from the numbers and percentages of my reading habits and what I can improve in this year. I had a wonderful time with my books in 2018, and though my habits and preferences have not changed much from those in 2017, I think I can definitely improve myself to read better in quality and quantity this year.

Definitely let me know your thoughts on anything I mentioned here in the comments down below, and I’ll talk to you in my next post!