Year in Review 2015

Happy 2016, readers! Hopefully everyone had a lovely and safe New Year’s Eve, and your 2016 is already off to a great start!

2015 was busier than I was expecting, and somehow not as much got done as I was hoping. I can’t even put my finger on why, exactly – this fall at least was supposed to be less busy than usual, but somehow wound up being more busy! I didn’t hit my reading goal (100 new books) for the year, not even close, and I had a few months were I didn’t read much at all. I also have gotten REALLY behind with blogging – I’ve got reviews from months ago that are still waiting to get done. I’m going to do my best to catch up in the next few weeks – Hopefully I’ll be able to hold to that. Some of those old reviews are going to be pretty short, though!

But enough with the negatives and things I didn’t do. The books I did read, while not as numerous as in previous years, were on the whole quite good, and provided a nice break whenever I could convince myself to take it! Let’s look at some stats, shall we?

• I finished 101 books this year, 82 of which were new-to-me, and 19 of which were re-reads. 100 new books was my personal goal for the year (revised down to 85 in October when it became obvious I wasn’t going to hit 100), so I missed that out, even the revised one. But I did at least pass the 100-mark for total books, so that’s something?
• 65 of those were paper or e-books, for a total of 18,877 pages read. The remaining 36 were audiobooks, with a total of 19.1 days of listening time. (Not included in either of those tallies are all the individual short stories I read and/or listened to.) If you count the text equivalent of the audiobooks, I consumed 33,353 pages of reading material this year.
• I read books by 72 different authors, 50% of which were new to me. I didn’t do such a good job of balancing the sex ratio: excluding anthologies, only 43% percent of the books I read were by female authors. Do better next year, self!
• I didn’t do a great job of reading my own books this year (new books, anyways, I re-read a bunch of my own books). Of the new books I read, only about 31% came from my TBR pile. Another 22% were audiobooks, 30% were graphic novels from the library, 10% were non-graphic-novel library books, and the remaining 7% were e-books freebies or from the eTBR “pile”.
• I was pretty good about not acquiring new books! I requested relatively few review copies this year – also a function of the not having as much time for reading and reviewing – and the library booksale in my new town is only open a few times a year, and I missed the fall sale. The result that I only added 40 books to my TBR pile – which is the lowest its ever been since I’ve been keeping track. I read 23 books from the pile, though, and cleared another 68 (donating them to the library sale or selling them to a used bookstore – and then NOT purchasing them again, which is key!), leaving me with a net change of -51 TBR books! Not too shabby!
• Of the books I read from my TBR pile, the average length of time between when I acquired them and when I finished them was 187.3 days. I didn’t read so many long-term TBR residents this year as in the past, but instead, I donated them!
• Even though I was reading relatively fewer review copies, more than half of the new books I read were still published in 2014 or 2015 (63%); however, the average publication date of my books was 2008.
• Unsurprisingly, about 40% half the books I read this year were fantasy; with sci-fi taking up another 20%, and non-fiction, historical fiction, classics, and contemporary fiction making up the rest (less historical fiction and more classics than normal, but not by a huge margin). Only about 25% of the books I read were young adult or mid-grade, which is less than normal for me.

You can calculate these kind of stats for yourself using my reading tracking spreadsheet. You can download the 2014 version here: 2014 reading tracking spreadsheet; just change the tabs for 2016. You can find the instructions for using it here: reading tracking spreadsheet instructions.

I’m not going to do a formal “best of” list for 2015, since I always have a really hard time getting my picks down to 5 or even 10 “best” books. Instead, here are my picks-of-the-month for the year! (Among my new books – picking books that I already loved enough to re-read as my favorite of the month just doesn’t seem fair.)

January	February	March	April
May	June	July	August
September	October	November	December

January: Legion: Skin Deep by Brandon Sanderson

February: Fairest by Marissa Meyer

March: Firefight by Brandon Sanderson

April: Sex Criminals, Vol. 1 by Matt Fraction (no contest; this was the only new book I read that month.)

May: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

June: The Martian by Andy Weir

July: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

August: The End of All Things by John Scalzi

September: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King

October: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett

November: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

December: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

What about you, readers? Read any good books last year?

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