Year in Review 2016

Ah, yes, May, the perfect time of year for an annual wrap-up. The fact that this post is coming four months later than it was supposed to should tell you something about my 2017, that reflects some trends from 2016. Namely, work continues to be busier than I expect it to be, and my reading time has correspondingly dropped off. Also, I adopted a dog in the summer of 2016, and while I love her and don’t regret it for a second, having a dog does take up more of my reading time (except when I remember to bring headphones for audiobooks on our walks, which is maybe 40% of the time.) My normal goal was 100 new books for the year, revised downwards mid-year to 75… and I didn’t even hit that. But I did do a fair amount of re-reading (including re-reading some pretty long books) so that does bring the numbers up a bit.)

I am also now almost a full year behind on reviews. (But I guess since I read substantially less than normal, that’s not as many reviews as it once might have been.) I’m going to try to start catching up and posting more reviews over the next few month or two, but since some of these books were read so long ago, my reviews are probably going to be a fair bit shorter than usual. Bear with me.

But enough with the negatives and things I didn’t do. Let’s look at some stats, shall we?

• I finished 87 books this year, 60 of which were new-to-me, and 27 of which were re-reads.
• 53 of those were paper or e-books, for a total of 17,582 pages read. The remaining 34 were audiobooks, with a total of 17.41 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 31,820 pages of reading material this year.
• I read books by 49 different authors, slightly more than 50% of which were new to me. I did a better job than usual of reading female authors (one of my goals after a male-heavy 2015): excluding anthologies, almost 60% percent of the books I read were by female authors.
• 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 30% came from my TBR pile. Another 33% were audiobooks, 22% were graphic novels from the library, 13% were non-graphic-novel library books, and the remaining 2% were e-books freebies or from the eTBR “pile”.
• I was pretty good about not acquiring new books! I only added 34 books to my TBR pile – which is the lowest its ever been since I’ve been keeping track. I only read 14 books from the pile, though, and cleared another 2 (DNFs), leaving me with a net change of +18 TBR books! Not terrible, but I’ve done better.
• 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 192 days.
• Almost half of the new books I read were published in 2015 or 2016, but because I read a decent number of classics, the average publication date of my books was 2003.
• Unsurprisingly, about 40% half the books I read this year were fantasy; with historical fiction taking up another 16%, science fiction, non-fiction, and contemporary fiction coming in at 10-12% each, and mysteries and classics accounting for the rest.
• About 34% of the books I read were young adult or mid-grade.

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 2017. You can find the instructions for using it here: reading tracking spreadsheet instructions.

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.)
Not all of these are necessarily favorites, as some months I only read one or two books, but the best of the year is definitely included!

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

January: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

February: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

March: Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

April: Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

May: The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church

June: A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King

July: Farthing by Jo Walton

August: Summer Days and Summer Nights by Stephanie Perkins

September: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

October: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

November: Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

December: Stars Above by Marissa Meyer

Reviews for the rest of these (hopefully) coming soon!

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

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