Final Reading Statistics for 2022
What with Covid ruining the holidays and a cat who’s been to the vet twice in two days, I’m wishing 2022 good riddance. (The only good thing the end of the year brought is a visit from my sister, who hadn’t been to the UK in 15.5 years. After a few cautionary days at a hotel in London, she’s been staying with us and enjoying the slower pace of life of these quiet, rainy days.) It was still a good reading year for me, though; I worried my total might plummet after my mom’s passing, but I found I read as much as ever, just maybe shorter books and more rereads. Late in the year I realized matching the previous three years’ total of 340 books wasn’t going to happen, so reduced my goal accordingly and managed to surpass it yesterday.
How I did with my 2022 goals
My goal for 2022 (which I had completely forgotten about!) was to read mostly backlist books. In fact, I read 44.9% current-year releases, which means 55.1% older material – even if just 2021 or 2020 releases. This is actually higher than my 41.8% new releases last year, so it looks like I failed to live up to the letter of my resolution, but still happened to read well over half “older” books.
Once again, my initial goal for the new year will be to get through all my set-aside books and my review backlog shelf. After that … I’ll just read some books and hope to enjoy them.
The statistics
Fiction: 53.3%
Nonfiction: 33%
Poetry: 13.7%
(Fiction and nonfiction are usually just about equal for me; I’m surprised that fiction pulled well ahead this year. I read a bit less poetry this year than last.)
Female author: 72.3%
Male author: 23%
Nonbinary author: 1.7%
Multiple genders (anthologies): 3%
(I’ve been reading more and more by women each year, but this is the first time that female + nonbinary authors have outnumbered men by more than 3:1.)
BIPOC author: 20.7%
(The second time I have specifically tracked this figure. I’m pleased that it’s higher than last year’s 18.5%, but will continue to work towards 25% or more.)
Work in translation: 8.7%
(Better than last year’s 5%! But I’d still like to get closer to 10%.)
E-books: 26.3%
Print books: 73.7%
(The number of e-books has doubled since last year because of my increase in reviewing for Kirkus and Shelf Awareness, for which I exclusively read e-books.)
Rereads: 12 (3.5%)
(The same number as last year, so one per month seems to be what I naturally gravitate towards. I have a whole shelf of books I’d love to reread, though, so I’d like it to be more like 2–3 a month.)
Where my books came from for the whole year, compared to last year:
- Free print or e-copy from publisher: 42% (↑10.2%)
- Public library: 30% (↑5.3%)
- Downloaded from NetGalley or Edelweiss: 7% (↑1.1%)
- Secondhand purchase: 6.7% (↓10.1%)
- New purchase (sometimes) at a bargain price): 4.7% (↓0.9%)
- Gifts: 4% (↑2%)
- Free (giveaways, The Book Thing of Baltimore, the free mall bookshop, etc.): 2.6% (↓6.7%)
- University library: 2.3% (↓1.5%)
- Borrowed: 0.7% (↑0.7%)
Additional statistics courtesy of Goodreads:
67,899 pages read
Average book length: 225 pages
Average rating for 2022: 3.6
Happy new year!
Final 2018 Statistics and Where My Books Came From
My most prolific year yet! (I’m sure I said the same last year, but really, this is a number I will most likely never top and shouldn’t attempt to.) People sometimes joke to me, “why not shoot for a book a day?!” but that’s not how I do things. Instead of reading one book from start to finish, I almost always have 10 to 20 books on the go at a time, and I tend to start and finish books in batches – I’m addicted to starting new books, but also to finishing them.
The breakdown:
Fiction: 44.9%
Nonfiction: 45.8%
Poetry: 9.3%
(I think this is the first time nonfiction has surpassed fiction! They’re awfully close, though. I read a bit less poetry this year than last.)
Male author: 38.1%
Female author: 61.9%
(Roughly the same thing has happened the last two years, which I find interesting because I have never consciously set out to read more books by women.)
E-books: 15.7%
Print books: 84.3%
(In 2016 I read one-third e-books; in 2017 it was one-quarter. For some reason I seem to find e-books less and less appealing. They are awfully useful for traveling. However, I’ve been cutting back on the reviewing gigs that rely on me reading only e-books.)
Works in translation: 4.8%
(Ouch – my reading in translation almost halved compared to last year. I’m going to have to make a point of reading more translated work next year.)
Where my books came from for the whole year:
- Free print or e-copy from publisher: 28.7%
- Public library: 20.8%
- Secondhand purchase: 20.6%
- Downloaded from NetGalley or Edelweiss: 14.9%
- Gifts: 5%
- Free (giveaways, GET Free Bookshop, Book Thing of Baltimore, etc.): 3.8%
- University library: 3.2%
- New purchase (usually at a bargain): 1.5%
- Kindle purchase: 0.9%
- Borrowed: 0.6%
Some interesting additional statistics courtesy of Goodreads:
How did 2018 turn out for you reading-wise?
Happy New Year!
Culling My Goodreads TBR
You could say my Goodreads to-read shelf has gotten out of hand. As of July 17th it was at 7190 titles. That includes pretty much every book I’ve ever heard about and thought “yeah, maybe I’ll read that someday.” Inspired by Eleanor’s “Down the TBR Hole” posts, I decided something needed to be done – but not just 5–10 titles at a time or I’d be at this forever. So in the last couple weeks I’ve looked through a few hundred or so entries on my TBR each day, starting with the ones that were added longest ago.
My culling strategies were as follows:
Remove:
- Any duplicates – it’s possible to add multiple editions of a book (especially print vs. Kindle) without realizing it.
- Anything I don’t recognize in the slightest, even after a brief refresher on the blurb.
- Anything that doesn’t look like something I would read; yes, I’m afraid this involves judging the book by its cover.
- Anything labeled #1, or that I know is a sequel – I don’t generally read series.
- Most of what came up in searches for “murder,” “kill,” “detect,” “body,” “blood” or “mystery” – just facing facts here: I don’t ever read crime fiction. If a murder is incidental to a plot, fine, but I don’t search out mysteries.
- Any book I already own in print or e-format; the book itself serves as the reminder that I intend to read it. [Exception: I maintain “Kindle priority” and “priority advanced 2017 read” shelves.]
Get down to just one to-find-next title for each author. I already know I’ll read anything by Wendell Berry or Margaret Atwood, so I don’t need 10 titles on my TBR; I’ll keep the one I’m most keen on at the moment. Likewise, I discovered three titles each by Ivan Doig, Helen Garner and Tom Drury on the TBR but can’t remember how I even heard of these authors; I cut down to one title apiece. [Exceptions:
- If an author has written in very different genres, I’ll retain two books to showcase the diversity, perhaps one fiction and one nonfiction.
- If it’s an author I know I want to read everything by and there’s just a handful more books that I need to find to complete the set (e.g. Carol Shields and Marcus Borg), I’ll keep them all on the list so I know to look out for them.]
Transfer some reference-type books (e.g. philosophy/ethics books, essay collections, anthologies and cookbooks) to my “to skim only” shelf.
Say goodbye to an author who’s disappointed me in the past (Marina Endicott), who I’ve decided I might not be interested in after all (Russell Banks), or whom I’ve gone off (Howard Jacobson).
Scan through for notably low average ratings.
- For any book where this is below, say, 3.4, I’ll look back at the blurb and scan through the reviews, especially those by friends, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether I want to keep it on the list.
- Any book with a rating significantly below 3.0 gets deleted as a matter of course. There is the potential here for deleting some books that are polarizing and I might just love, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take; if I’m meant to read a book in my lifetime, it’ll happen somehow. [At one point, to hurry things along, I organized the to-read shelf by ascending average rating and (after getting past a bunch of 0.00 ratings for pre-release or unrated books) managed to cull a good number of books with a 2.-something average.]
This has turned out to be a much more laborious process than I’d hoped, mostly because you can only delete one title at a time and always have to click “OK” to verify. It would go so much faster if I could select 10 or 20 titles to delete at once. Yet it’s ended up being a rewarding undertaking because I’ve rediscovered many books I’d completely forgotten about. Along the way I’m adding loads to my thematic shelves and have updated my “priority to find” list. I’ve also created various new shelves like “parenting,” “dementia” and “Nancy Pearl recommendation”.
After working on this off and on for two weeks – keeping a Goodreads window open all day while doing other computer work – I managed to get the TBR down to 5498 titles. So I’ve cut the original list down by about 23.5%. However, I still have 91 pages of results to sift through. It’s a bit depressing that after all the effort I’ve put in I still have so much to do when I get back from America. At the same time, it’s quite the addictive little task. The idea is that ultimately the TBR will be significantly shorter and more targeted to my tastes.
I shall report back when I’m finally finished!
How do you keep your (virtual or physical) TBR shelf under control?
Bloggers’ Opinions Must Not Be Bought: A Cautionary Tale
I’m leery of accepting self-published work for review. If this is prejudice on my part, it’s not unjustified: I’ve reviewed hundreds of self-published books during my four years of freelance work for Kirkus, Foreword, BlueInk, Publishers Weekly, and The Bookbag, and although I do find the very occasional gem that could hold its own in a traditional market, the overall quality is poor. When self-published authors get in touch via my blog, I usually delete their enquiries immediately. But for some reason I decided to give a second look to a request I received through Goodreads earlier this year. (All identifying details have been removed.)
I’ll admit it: the flattery probably helped:
This was for a historical novel that had 4-star reviews from two Goodreads friends whose judgment I trust, so I agreed to have the author send a copy to my parents’ house in the States so that it would be waiting for me there when I arrived for my recent trip. When I opened the box, two alarm bells rang at once. First there was this. Uh oh.
Second of all: the author had taken the trouble of looking up restaurants in my parents’ area and ordered a $60 gift card from one of them to send along with the book parcel. Double uh oh.
I spent weeks wondering what in the world I was going to do about this ethical quandary. I even contacted a Goodreads friend who’d reviewed the book and asked what their experience with the author had been like. The reply was very telling:
I still feel unsettled over my interaction with [name redacted]. I’ve always made it a point not to review unsolicited books. But over a period of several weeks, [they] sent me a number of emails that ranged from flattering to fawning – and always polite and charming. Eventually, I, too, received a $60 gift card to a favorite restaurant that was within blocks of my home. I ended up, I believe, 4 starring [the] book, although the truth is that it was more of a 3-star read. Since reviewing, I have valued my independence – and honesty – and since then, have had the uncomfortable feeling of being “bought”, and for a low price at that.
I cannot tell you what to do. Obviously, I feel as if my own values were compromised. For me, it wasn’t worth what I still believe is a blot on my integrity. If you do decide to review, I’d simply encourage you to be honest because (I learned the hard way) the aftermath isn’t a good feeling.
Well, I’d promised to review the book, so I forced myself to open it, pencil in hand. After I’d corrected 10 problems of punctuation and grammar within the first six pages, I commenced skimming. There were some decent folksy metaphors and a not-half-bad dual narrative of a young woman’s odyssey and a small town’s feuds. But there were also dreadful sex scenes, melodramatic plot turns, and dialogue and slang that didn’t ring true for the time period. If I squinted pretty darn hard, I could see my way to likening the novel to the works of Ron Rash and Daniel Woodrell. But it wasn’t by any means a book I could genuinely recommend.
So when the author checked up a couple of months later to see whether I had gotten the book and what I thought of it, here’s what I replied:
I received the following abject apology, but no helpful information.
To my brief follow-up –
– I received this:
Note the phrase “self-promoted” and the meaningless repetition of “couldn’t put it down!”
And then they went on to disparage me for my age?!
I don’t believe for a minute that this person was ignorant of what they were doing in sending the gift cards. What’s saddest to me is that they have zero interest in getting an honest opinion of the work or hearing constructive criticism that could help them improve. They clearly don’t respect professionals’ estimation, either, or they’d be brave enough to pay for a review from Kirkus or another independent body. Instead, they’ve presumably been ‘paying’ $60 a pop to get fawning but utterly false 5-star reviews. Just imagine how much money they’ve spent on shipping and ‘thank-you gifts’ – easily many thousands of dollars.
And could I really have been the first in 180+ people to express misgivings about what was going on here? How worrying.
I was tempted to be generous and give the novel the briefest of 3-star reviews, perhaps as an addendum to another review on my blog, just so that I could feel justified in keeping the gift card and not have to face a confrontation with the author. But it didn’t feel right. If I want my reviews to have integrity, they have to reflect my honest opinions. As it stands, I have the gift card in an envelope, ready to be returned to the author when I’m in the States for my sister’s wedding next month; the book will most likely get dropped off at a Little Free Library.
If I was a vindictive person, I’d be going on Goodreads and Amazon and giving the book a 1-star review: as a necessary corrective to the bogus 5-star ones, and as a way of exposing this dodgy self-promotional activity. But that would in turn expose all of this person’s readers, including a valued Goodreads friend. And who knows how the author would try to retaliate.
So there you have it. My cautionary tale of a self-published author trying to buy my good opinion. What have I learned? Mostly to be even more wary of self-published work; possibly not to make any promises to review a book until I’ve seen a sample of it. But also to listen to my conscience and, when something is wrong, have the courage to speak out right away.
I’m curious: what would you have done?
Bookish Time-Wasting Strategies
Being self-employed has certainly helped me develop better self-motivation and self-discipline, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still procrastinate with the best of them. When I do, though, I try to keep it book-related. Here are ten of my chief time-wasters:
- Requesting advance books via NetGalley and Edelweiss. I really don’t need any more books, but I can’t resist trawling the online listings to see what’s coming out in the next few months. It feels like a special treat to get to read favorite authors’ new books before they’re technically released – I have the new Jonathan Safran Foer, Maria Semple and Alexandra Kleeman books lined up to read soon.
- Checking out The Bookbag’s and Nudge’s offerings for reviewers. The same goes for these: more print ARCs on the pile is the last thing I need, but I simply have to know what they have for reviewers to choose from. Sometimes I come across books I’d never heard of, or ones I thought were only available in America. Still, I am trying to be very choosy about what I volunteer for.
- Browsing Goodreads giveaways. I’m going to sound like a broken record – I seem incapable of resisting free books, wherever they come from. Every few weeks I spend an hour or two occasionally switching over to the Goodreads giveaways page while I’m doing other things online. It takes some persistence to wade through all the rubbish to get to the entries for proper books you’d actually be interested in owning, but it can be worth it. Over the years I’ve won 49 books through Goodreads.
- Catching up on Twitter. I follow a ton of publishers, authors and publicists on Twitter. I am very bad about using the site regularly – I usually only remember to go on it when I have a blog to promote, and otherwise find it rather overwhelming – but when I do I often find information about a bunch of new-to-me books and see competitions to enter. I’ve won a couple of books and tote bags this way.
- Sorting through book-related clippings. I keep a file folder of clippings, mostly from the Guardian, related to books I think I’m likely to read. Every so often I go back through the file to find reviews of books I’ve read in the meantime, recycle ones I’m no longer interested in and so on.
- Rearranging my bedside books. Pretty much the same books have been on my nightstand shelves all year, but I’m constantly adjusting the piles to reflect their level of priority: review books are at the top, in chronological order by deadline; other rough piles are planned sets of reading. I take some glee in arranging these groups – adding a memoir here and a work of historical fiction there – all the while imagining how well they’ll complement each other.
- Organizing my Goodreads shelves. In addition to the standard “to read,” “read,” and “currently reading” shelves, I’ve set up a few dozen customized ones so that it’s easy for me to search my collection by theme. Recently I decided “illness and death” was a bit too broad of a descriptor so set up some more specific categories: “bereavement memoirs,” “cancer memoirs,” “old age,” etc.
- Culling the books on my Kindle. The digital collection is currently at 259 books. Every so often I take a long hard look at the e-books I’ve amassed and force myself to be honest about what I will actually read. If I don’t think I’m likely to read a book within the next year, I delete it. (These are all books I’ve downloaded for free, so it’s not like I’m throwing money away.)
- Looking up prices on webuybooks.co.uk. If you’re based in the UK, you probably already know about this website. I resell a bunch of books via Amazon, but sometimes the going rate is so low that you’re better off selling things as a job lot to WeBuyBooks. Their offer is often reasonable, and they frequently run deals where you can increase it by 10%. You box up the books and they send a courier to collect them from your front door – what could be easier?
- Ticking off books from lists. I don’t actively seek out books from 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die or the Guardian’s “1000 novels everyone must read” lists, but maybe once a year I go back through and tick off the ones I happen to have read recently.
Silly Stuff (Recent Follows, Likes, Searches, and Comments)
Another review catch-up post and the first few of my 20 Books of Summer are coming up later this week. Before that … I’ve been saving up some funny follows and spam comments, as well as a couple of likes on Goodreads that were too apt not to share. I also always enjoy looking at the random searches that have led people to my blog. (Previously surveyed in May 2016, October 2016, June 2017, and July 2020.)
My blog has divine approval.
(I especially love the idea that I can find out “what he’s up to” by reading his blog.)
The right readers found my reviews.
Random searches:
July 29, 2020: shaun bythell anna, val howlett, ruth pavey, romance novel with a butler named bolt
September 15: meaning of ian love doreen, what is the meaning of the title clock dance?
November 20: ordinary planet comic, isabelle’s appearance in olive again
February 10, 2021: promise and fail soap by celestial church, review of the moon and sixpence, books less than 50 pages, winter soldier novel zimmer smoking pipe
March 24: one foot in the grave mr prosnett, employer and “silvie braun”, short poem about a black cat called scarlett
May 7: shaun bythell wedding, jessica fox shaun, who is shaun bythell wife, shaun bythell partner anna
(So much enduring interest in Shaun Bythell’s love life!!)
Spam comments that made me laugh:
August 22, 2020: “Ranunculus, Wax Flowers, Combined Greenery.” (from “Get well soon cards with flowers”)
November 27: “Hi there mates, fastidious paragraph and nice urging commented here, I am truly enjoying by these.”
December 2: “hi, i am woo from Sweden and i want to explain any thing about “pandemic”. Please ask me 🙂”
March 2, 2021: “carrie underwood songs sad”
If you blog, too, do you keep an eye on these things?
What’s the funniest one you had lately?