"Read 50 - 100 books this year - I started my goal at 50 books in 2013 and I'm going to do that again, but I did end up upping it through out the year and ended up reading 115 books in all. Which is awesome, I cannot believe I read that many books."That was my goal for how many books I wanted to read and, when I passed it, I just kept upping my goal. And kept passing it. It felt ridiculous and fun and it was definitely a high stress year, and books are a fantastic escape.
I also think I know how I read so many books this year - I stopped reading so much fan fiction. I started reading fan fiction in middle school (listen, Marauders era, HPFF.com, don't judge me), and I've never really stopped. It tends to jump to whatever my current media obsession is, but there are some I'll always go back to, and Harry Potter is, of course, where I started. Anyway - not reading as much, turning to books instead of to fan fiction, has really changed my year.
And I love fan fiction still, don't get me wrong, but I'd been meaning to cut back for a while and I did it almost automatically. And now, after a year, I'm starting to kind of feel like that I'll keep it this way. Though, I'm not planning on ever being able to recreate a year like this, read this many books.
I'm going to be writing a full post about series separately - the ones I've finished this year and before and the ones I want to finish - but I've never done a kind of "wrap up" of the year and I wanted to this year. I wanted to kind of talk about a more stats breakdown of what I read.
I read a lot of books, a lot of good books, and also a lot of graphic novels/manga/comics. I feel like my male/female divide for authors was pretty good (though I'd still, maybe, like to lean even further female. YA might be full of female authors, but other genres aren't). And I'd of liked to have read more books that I owned before 2014.
Now, to start with the number, 143 books I read this year I bought this year - while I only read 111 books I owned (bought before 2014). Whew, I'd kind of like to reference those numbers for 2015, if not even more for the read bought before 2015 now.
I did a very vague breakdown of the books I read that I'm going to try and show you now (that I did not count rereads in the genres, the genres are breakdowns of new to me books that aren't in any of the other categories).
Pages Read: 75,259
This feels like a ridiculous amount of pages to me. My previous best year was 2013 and I only read 30k pages, which is still a lot, but no where near 75k. I'm still kind of stunned about this, that is so many pages.
Comics: 66
Rereads: 32
Classics: 8
Non-fiction: 5
I'm okay with those numbers, I might of been a little lenient with my classics (most aren't full length novels, but I didn't know where else to put them).
MG: 9
Young Adult - 65
SciFi: 11
Fantasy: 27
Contemporary: 27
Adult - 54
SciFi: 9
Fantasy: 7
Horror(all genres): 4
Romance: 28
Urban Fantasy: 6
Other/Misc: 10
Alright - to explain a little more about those break downs, it seems like a shockingly small amunt and it kind of is, in my opinion, I want to see all of those numbers go up (except for romance. How did I read that many this year? They're just so light and fluffy...)
Not counting rereads, I think, it what made all the numbers so small. Also, I know these are super vague categories and I made them like that mostly because I didn't want to have one book a category. Also, I just kind of went with feeling. (And fantasy, mostly, includes all fantasy, particularly in the YA section).
However, I'm not surprised I read more young adult then adult this year, I barely read any YA the last two years (before this one), so to have read so much doesn't surprise me. Also, this isn't a knock against it, but it is easier to read the adult. And I couldn't tell you why, but I definitely fly through YA faster then adult (specifically high fantasy, which should surprise no one, but even YA high fantasy I read quicker).
And I don't think I'm going to try and change those numbers too much, besides the fact that I'd like to read more adult genre fiction (horror, fantasy, scifi - being my main focuses, because damn I thought those numbers would be higher.
I also want to add one more thing and didn't know where to put it. I mentioned that I think a big reason I was able to read so much was not reading as much fanfiction, which I still think. However - I also think it has to do with rereads. You can see above I've reread a lot of books in 2014. Thirty two of the books I read this year were rereads. And I kind of think that's a good thing? Mostly because of what it caused.
This is totally a 'whoa do you think that means this...?' kind of thing, but I think rereading that much kept me from falling into too far of a reading rut or slump. I had slumps this month, but when it happened, I didn't push. I just let it go and did other things, before going: okay, that's enough, reading now. And then I reread something and kind of relaunched myself into reading stuff again.
I was thinking that was a shit ton of rereads, and it is (but I'd been craving to get some rereading done). I don't think I'll be rereading quite as much as that this year, but there are still books that I'm craving to reread.
This was more me looking back on my own reading and thinking about it and so I wasn't sure about posting it, before realizing it might be interesting to you. And I hope it is. Any thoughts about my stats? Or about the ideas I pulled from those stats? I'm curious if you're a rereader or not (obviously I am, I always have been, and I don't want to loose that. No matter how many unread books are staring at me).
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