It’s so hard to believe that we are wrapping up the year 2020! I feel like I’ve just ran a marathon- a marathon where around every corner someone is throwing something at me that it totally unexpected. Sometimes good, mostly overwhelming.
Anyways- I apparently still managed to spend some time reading this year! I read more books this year than ever before. It helped that I did take several month long breaks from social media and of course in the last month of the year I managed to cram in 13 books just to reach my (newly set) goal of 100!
Books Read this Year: 102 (You can see the entire list by following me on Goodreads: Suzanne Hines)
Pages Read: 30,731 pages
Fiction: 56 books (55%)
Non-Fiction: 46 books (45%)
Earliest Publication Date: 1853 (12 Years A Slave)
Most Recent Publication Date: 2020 (Lots in the this category, but the one I read most recently was The Magical Language of Others)
Longest Book: The Toll (625 pages)
Shortest Book: Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (80 pages)
Male Author: 22 books (21%)
Female Author: 80 books (78%)
Written by a person from a different race or culture than me: 23 books (22%)
5 Star Reads: You can find my blog post listing my 5 star reads here!
In case you are wondering, I originally set my goal for the year to be 45 books. In November, I realized that I was getting really close to 100 and decided to really push myself to read 12 books in December! Also please keep in mind that I did include several kids chapter books that I read out loud to my kids. These were not picture books, but they were fairly quick and easy reads with less than 100 pages!
One of my goals for my reading life has been to be a bit more intentional with the books that I pick up and read. There is so much junk out there and it’s easy to use the excuse of reading to fill my head with fluff that is really no better than just wasting my time consuming TV or social media. I don’t know if I really accomplished the goal of picking more meaningful books this year, but I do know that I was more free in allowing myself to not finish a book if it wasn’t too my liking or didn’t meet my standards. I always feel compelled to finish a book because someone wrote it and someone else recommended and so and so is raving about it. But I’m learning how to say no to books that just don’t add anything to my own personal life. This is still a major work in progress and is something that I will continue to be working on as I go forward! Another thing that I would like to work on is reading books from different times/years. Most of the books that I read have been published within the last 10 years, which is fine…I would just love to expand my reading beyond that. I also would like to continue to seek out and read books written by authors from different cultures or different races than me. This has become a huge push in recent months amongst the book community, and I’ve found that some books I pick up by a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) just aren’t the plot or content that I enjoy reading. So as I continue to read frequently, I want to find BIPOC (also Asian and South American) authors who write beautifully and with content that fits my reading style. For sure it is a balance and I’m learning!
The thing that was most shocking to me in these statistics was that only 21% of the 102 books I read were written by a male author! That is so fascinating to me- I would have thought that it would be far close to 50/50. I feel pretty neutral on this fact- I certainly wasn’t trying to read more female/less male authors, but that is how it turned out!
And a quick comparison of my reading this year in comparison to previous years, here is what I have recorded through Goodreads:
2020: 102 books
2019: 58 books
2018: 64 books
2017: 32 books
Wow! What a year! How many books did you read this year? What was your favorite one? Do you have any book goals for 2021?