2022 Reading Stats

Hey all! It’s time to check out my reading stats from 2022! I will be talking about my Reading Goals/Challenges in a seperate post but I did read 123 books in 2022 which considering I was in a slump for about 2 months of the year I’m pretty happy with that. Let’s jump in!

The Overview

Starting out with the books read per month. As I said previously I was in a slump for about 2/3 months of 2022. August I didn’t any books at all… So that was unfortunate but it is what it is. In Nov & July I was also struggling as well but at least I 5 & 3 books in those months. I did read over 20 books in Jan & Apr though which I’m really happy with!

I love seeing this comparison between books read & pages read. Like January is a big chunk in the books read but smaller in pages read because I was reading graphic novels & shorter books. So I read a lot of them but the pages/book were a lot less than other months! The fact that I read 7224 pages in April is crazy. I read 10 graphic novels, 11 audiobooks & 1 hardcover in April which attributed to that awesome amount of pages read.

The Reading

Firstly starting with formats. This year the overwhelming majority of books I read were on audiobook, followed by graphic novels. While I would love to read more physically it’s not always realistic with my life. I’m a busy person. I work full time, run a small business, am the organiser of an automotive show & shine, travel a heap/attend events as an automotive photographer & am an active member of 3 local organisations/clubs. Sometimes I just don’t have time. Or I’m mentally exhausted and don’t have the capacity to read physically. I’m so grateful I have a job where I can listen to audiobooks at work but even that I can’t always do depending on the work I’m doing. Part of my job is doc control and trying to listen to an audiobook while proof reading or writing documents just doesn’t work well. I think that also has impacted my physical reading to a degree as well. When somedays I’m spending 6 hours reading/reviewing documents the last thing I feel like doing is coming home and reading more. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job & I love my life but I have had to come to terms with the fact that my reading formats and capabilities have changed compared to when I was working part time & both my small business & photography were minimal things in my life.

This year I tried to branch out and read more adult books. I’ve always read YA and I do love it but I want to branch into adult more to see what it has to offer. Compared to 2021 where I read 15 adult books I’ve now got that number up to 24 which I’m happy with. I think that will be even higher in 2023 as a good chunk of books on my TBR are adult now. I’m also curious about the New Adult range though I find majority of the books labelled NA are romance/contemporary books which is not where I gravitate.

The Books

Now this one is quite interesting especially in comparison to 2021. I’ll put both graphs below the 2022 Genres Read a side by side with 2022 on the left & 2021 on the right. As you can see there is a significant difference in these numbers. In 2021 my most read genre was Fantasy and while it still is in 2022 there is a big difference between 47 fantasy read & 72 fantasy read. This year I read more sci-fi, contemporary & dystopian than previous years. Actually I read a little more of everything this year except historical fiction & fantasy. Historical Fiction is still sitting at a 2 and Fantasy is down this year because I was branching into other genres more and I’ve really enjoyed it! I’m really finding my love for Mystery & Thrillers again & I think those two more than anything will be increased in 2023 as well.

I also wanted to quickly show the Moods of the books I read reading this year. This is generated by StoryGraph which is an alternative to GoodReads and I much prefer it. Each book when reviewing you can categories and it takes both yours & other peoples categorisation and creates a graph of what you read the most. I’m honestly not surprised that adventurous, mysterious, dark & tense are the highest as they are definitely things I gravitate towards intentionally. The emotional one is a little surprising but I did read a fair few LGBT contemporaries and similar books this year that would have had that kind of theme to them.

Also here is the StoryGraph Genres break down. I don’t consider the targeted age range a genre so mine are in two graphs but I thought it would be interesting to include this graph as it covers some categories that I don’t. Like anything labelled romance that I read is usually also labelled as contemporary so I put it in there. Same with Crime. It usually goes in either Thriller or Mystery for me.

Something else StoryGraph tracks that I don’t in my spreadsheet is pacing. It’s not surprising that a majority of the books I read were fast paced as that is what I gravitate towards.

Next is the page lengths of the books I read which is actually a lot less diverse than previous years. This year I didn’t read any books over 600 pages. I read a lot of 300-400 page books. In 2021 over 30% of the books I read were 400 or larger whereas 2022 it was only 18%. Though I’m not surprised about the number of books under 300 pages I read as a fair chunk of those would be the graphic novels I read.

Now for publication year. I actually didn’t read anything published prior to the 1991-2000 (thats the little pink section where there was only 1 book in the section).

Next we have if a book was a standalone or part of a series. I read a higher percentage of standalones this year than previous years which I’m happy with. My aim for 2023 is to finish series I’ve started so there is a possibility that the percentage of standalones will reduce next year to accomodate that but it is what it is.

The Experience

Now for Star Ratings! So this will be a little different than previous years as I slightly re-evaluated what a 5 star means to me this year. I did talk about this in previous posts but I found that I was being fairly generous with the numbers. I’m not saying my feelings have changed but the number assigned to that has. In previous years I was giving a lot of 5 stars which is fine but I found within all those 5 star ratings there were a big difference my favourite favourites and the ones I just really enjoyed. So this year a 5 was absolute favourites. 4.5 and 4 was the really enjoyed. 3.5 and 3 was enjoyed but maybe not as gripping or entertaining as I would like or there was a minor issue I had. They were fine books but nothing stood out as a heck year I loved this book. 2.5 and 2 were I didn’t enjoy this or there were problems and lower than that was why the hell did I finish this. This has major issues or I was bored to tears reading this.

So because of that I only rated 4 books 5 stars this year but I’m happy to say I absolutely loved them and they deserve that 5 stars! I still have a decent chunk of 4.5 & 4 star books that I really enjoyed as well as some 3.5 which were still enjoyable but didn’t blow me away. I feel like I’m finally understanding my reading taste a bit more so I’m more conscience of what books I’m choosing to pick up which means more higher rated books. There are still some I don’t enjoy throughout but it’s getting less.

Also my reread star ratings. I always keep these seperate from my first time read ratings as I already know these are going to be 4 & up as I’m loved them so I’m rereading them…

The Diversity

Now onto the diversity in the books I read! Firstly 60% of the books I read had some form of diversity in it whether it be LGBT+, POC, Mental Health or Disability. There is a chance that I miss it on occasion, especially if it’s side characters and it’s mentioned in passing, so the percentage may be higher than that. But I’m really happy that more than 50% of the books I read were diverse which was my goal!

Now to dive into the type of diversity! So out of those 74 books 56% were LGBT+ which I’m really happy about. 3 books featured disability representation which is a new one I tracked in 2022 that I didn’t previously. I did start tracking that part way through the year & tried to recall which books had rep but I may have missed some. 9 of the books I read had mental health rep which is up from last year. POC is also up from last year with 27 books having POC characters.

Now let’s break down even further with what LGBT+ representation I read. I’m really glad that this list is more diverse than last year. I believe last year I only had Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Asexual & Non-Binary. This year there is so many more! I definitely still need to work on reading more diversely still within the LGBT+ category but I’m so glad there are more LGBT+ books coming out and I was able to read so many.
*Obviously there are occasions where a character doesn’t specifically say they are a certain sexuality so at times I had to make an educated assumption based on the information that was provided. This is not something I would ever do in real life but for the purpose of stats tracking it’s just what I had to do.
Also you may notice that these numbers don’t add up to the 50 LGBT+ books I read and that’s because I allowed two spots per book. There are plenty of books I read that had more than 2 LGBT+ characters but I kept it at two this year and just chose the representation of the most major characters.

Now for Mental Health Rep. A majority were anxiety rep but also read one with OCD & one with PTSD which was interesting as I don’t believe I have ever read anything with PTSD rep before. For this category I also allowed two spots per book as some had more than one Mental Health representation and I wanted to record that.

Lastly for diversity we have POC rep. Now this one is a bit broad in nature as it’s not always specified a specific culture or race. So I separated it into geographical area and used where the book was set or what area inspired the book if fantasy or sci-fi to make an educated guess if it wasn’t specified. There were still 3 that were unknown. It mentioned a character was dark skinned but not a specific race or area was obvious to me.

The Author

Next is Author Gender. This year I read 12 books by Non-Binary authors & 2 by Trans authors which was awesome. I had an aim to read from more diverse authors so I’m glad I increased this from last year.

Another author diversity thing is Authors of Colour. Which is about on par with last year and I want to work on increasing it. I did at one point try and track what racial area authors were from but I couldn’t always find that information. There was more unknown than filled in sections so I ended up going back to a simple yes or no.

Keeping on the author train we have if the author was someone I had read from before or new to me author. This percentage is about on par with previous years. I love supporting authors I already love but also supporting new. I want to try and get it a little more 50/50 in 2023 but it’s not a huge deal if that doesn’t happen.

Lastly for author related graphs we have the Ownvoices. This is up from last year which I’m happy about!

Also another interesting one from StoryGraph was more read authors.

Well that is it for my 2022 Reading Stats! I’m really happy with the types of books I was reading in 2023 and I hope to continue going in this direction for 2023!