Reading Year in Review: 2021

Welcome to my favorite post to write ever and that’s my reading year in review! I am here to share all the stats for my reading in 2021 and I am always beyond excited to chat about all the different statistics of my reading. I did this post in 2018 and 2019 and 2020 as well, so you can contrast and compare!

Housekeeping: I track my reading using Goodreads and also a spreadsheet created by Brock Roberts from Let’s Read. Let’s jump in!

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This is the lowest number of books I read in a year in a while, but this is also one of the busiest I’ve been ever, so it’s to be expected. Also this is the first time in a while where I think I had a really solid reading year in terms of quality, so I am satisfied with that. I reread only ONE book this year, which is really weird, since I am a big rereader, and I wish I reread more, but it’s always hard to balance between new and well-loved books. The one annoying thing is the fact that I have two books I am in the middle of that I did not get to finish, but such is life. One even might end up on a favorites list for 2022, we’ll see.

Genres

As with any year, my top three genres are cemented, they just switch positions – so 1. Literary Fiction, 2. Romance, and 3. Fantasy. This year literary fiction overtook my reading, and Fantasy took a bit of a back seat, and I definitely felt its abscence. Romance is really easy to pick up and read, and it’s truly a comfort genre for me, so it usually stays in that second place. The science fiction genre stays underrepresented despite me deciding every year that I will get into the genre because I am a useless human being. I am also glad that non fiction comprises a bigger portion of my reading this year.

Year of Publication

This is actually an improvement from previous years. ARCs used to dominate my reading, so I was only reading the current year’s released books, and while that is still the case, I definitely am dipping back into some of my backlist TBR, which is good. That being said, I fully expect to still read many new releases this year.

Books by Month

I also love looking at this month by month breakdown. I read only TWO books in December, and those two I started in November. But overall, my reading was way more even than usual, with the exception of April (this was the Brood month SO A WIN EITHER WAY).

Ratings

These are my rating excluding rereads, and as usual, I refuse to give a book 5 stars. But, the majority of my reading was 4.5 and 4 stars which is why I feel like this reading year went so well. Also, I had 3 one star reads this year (you can find my most disappointing books HERE) which I almost never give, but those books were atrocious. My overall average rating is 3.5, which makes sense and is higher than in 2020. So great overall!

Age Group

I’ve read even less YA than last year, and I definitely think I am moving away from the genre, and only going to be picking up books from authors I love in the future. I do want to try and read more Middle Grade in the future, the vibes are just immaculate in Middle Grade.

This Year’s TBR or Backlist?

I am glad that my previous TBR makes up a larger portion of my reading, finally. I barely reread so this is much lower than in previous years.

Author Status

I have read almost an equal amount of new to me authors and authors I’ve read from before. I would love to keep this up (read new things but also go back to authors I enjoyed before).

Debut?

Almost a third of the books I read this year were debuts, which is exciting, and hopefully I can keep this up, because I think debuts are generally exciting.

Blogging Stats

Followers at the end of the year: 1297
Views in 2021: 39.2K
Visitors in 2021: 29.1K

As with any year, this is to say THANK YOU, for making this awful and busy year better and for offering me a place to discuss books and talk about them in a really gratifying way with you all. The blog took a backseat in the second part of the year, but I am hoping to keep up this momentum and hopefully put out posts more frequently. I loved reading your comments and talking about books and just thank you for always being so kind and wonderful to me.

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