Year in Review 2017

If we can have Christmas in July, we can also have a year-end wrap-up in July, right? Let’s not think about the state of my to-do list; let’s look at some of my reading stats instead, shall we?

• I finished 82 books this year, 55 of which were new-to-me, and 27 of which were re-reads.
• 47 of those were paper or e-books, for a total of 14,988 pages read. The remaining 35 were audiobooks, with a total of 16.39 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 29,122 pages of reading material this year.
• I read books by 53 different authors, about 45% of which were new to me. My gender split was pretty good; 42 of the books I read were by men, and 40 were by women.
• 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 26% came from my TBR pile. Another 38% were audiobooks, 31% were from the library, and the remaining 5% were e-books freebies or from the eTBR “pile”.
• I was pretty good about not acquiring new books! I only added 13 books to my TBR pile – which is BY FAR the lowest its ever been since I’ve been keeping track. I only read 10 books from the pile ,but I cleared another 7 when I moved, leaving me with a net change of -4 TBR books!
• 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 381 days.
• About a third of the new books I read were published in 2016 or 2017, but another third were from the 1990s, so the average publication date of my books was 2008.
• Unsurprisingly, about half the books I read this year were fantasy; with historical fiction taking up another 18%, science fiction and non-fiction coming in at 9% each, and mysteries, contemporary fiction, and classics accounting for the rest.
• About 41% 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 2018. 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: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

February: Crosstalk by Connie Willis

March: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

April: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (audiobook) by J. K. Rowling

May: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

June: The Hammer of Thor by Rick Riordan

July: Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

August: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

September: The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn

October: These Vicious Masks by Tarun Shanker & Kelly Zekas

November: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

December: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

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

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

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