my 2022 reading STATS!! 📊 year in review - genre, star rating + more!

Who's ready to get statistic-y? It's not even a word. Hello, my loves. Welcome back to my channel. Today, we're going to be doing my 2022 reading statistics. I'm so excited. Well, today is going to be the best day ever. I love stats. I love stats, right? I love looking into statistics, looking into my reading for the year, and that's what we're going to be doing today. We're going to be getting really nerdy with all of the stats that I can tell you and reflecting on how my reading went in 2022. We're going to be looking at genres, star rating, how long a book had spent on my TBR, what kind of authors I was reading, what kind of age range I was reading, everything. We're going to be tracking about everything, so if you like charts and statistics, this is the video for you. Let's just get into it. There's nothing holding us back. We're going to start with the Goodreads statistics that Goodreads give you, but that's quite, in my opinion, limited. I like to track a lot more than that, and then we'll get into the kind of charts that I have made. Okay, so in 2022, I read 132 books, which I am really happy with. That is the most I have ever read in a year. That is 41,181 pages, which, again, I'm happy with. I don't actually know how many pages I've read in previous years. Let's see how many I read in 2020, because that was, I think, the year that I read 131 books, which I'll have at that in a second. I actually read more pages in 2020, 42,000, but that's pretty typical for me. That seems to be the number that I keep hitting. I would love to hit 50,000. How cool would that be? But anyways, so yeah, at the start of the year, my reading goal was 150. I was trying to read 150 books for the first time, and as some of you may know, I had a pretty rough start to 2022, and I didn't read a lot. I only read, I think, five books in January, so I think if I had read more in the first couple months of the year, perhaps I would have hit 150, but it just didn't happen. So I think in September time, I set my goal to 132 books, so one more than the most I've ever read in a year, and I did it! So that is the most books I've ever read in a year. I'm pretty happy with that. The shortest book I read this year was Randomised by Andy Weir at 28 pages. This was part of the Forward Collection, which is these sci-fi novellas that are on Kindle. And the longest book I read this year was Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee at 713 pages. Quite a lot, huh? Quite a big book. My average book length in 2022 was 311 pages, which I feel like is pretty standard. You know, I read some books that are under 300 pages, I read some that are, like, 500 pages. It all averages out to 311, which I feel like... I feel like an average book length is, like, 311 pages. You know, I feel like most books are, like, around the 300 mark. Oh, ----. I was just trying to adjust my camera and it's moved loads. Oh, no! Okay, hold up, everyone. We're doing some manoeuvring of the camera. I'm so sorry. The level of unprofessionalism, far too much. Okay, right. We're just dealing with the camera having changed slightly. So the book that most other people have shelved on Goodreads that I read this year was Circe by Madeleine Miller, with almost 2 million people having shelved this, which is kind of crazy. The book that least people have shelved was Stephen Fry's Inside Your Mind, an Audible original, which 114 people had shelved. That isn't technically a book, I don't think. Stephen Fry does some of these shorts, like, he does the Inside Your Mind ones, but I love his historical ones. He does, like, Victorian England, Edwardian England, these kind of, like, Audible series. And I'm like, what is the difference between that and, like, a really high quality non-fiction audiobook? There isn't one. So I'm reading on Audible, I'm counting it as a book. Don't care. The rules don't apply. I think a lot of people have shelved this because it technically is not a book, but I count it towards my goal and I don't care, right? I make the rules, so. My average rating for 2022 was 3.7, which I think is my average rating for Goodreads, like, ever, so at least I'm consistent. I feel like that's a pretty high average rating at 3.7. The highest rated on Goodreads book that I read this year was, again, Jade Legacy at a 4.67, which is a ridiculously high rating. And I think it deserves it. I love Jade Legacy so much. I can't wait. I need to make my dad read this series. Okay, let's get into my statistics now. One thing that I think is interesting that I just want to tell you that we don't have a graph for, because we have a graph for everything else, is the average time a book had been on my TBR. This is something that I started tracking this year for the first time, and the average time a book had been on my TBR before I read it this year was 7.3 months, which I feel like is pretty good. I read a lot of books just as they came onto my TBR, like new releases that hadn't been on there long, but I also got through some books like Circe. Circe was one of the oldest books on my TBR. That had probably been on, I don't even want to know how many months that had been on my TBR for. Let's find out. 44 months that had been on my TBR. So it all averaged out to 7.3, which I feel like, you know, shows I had a balance of reading books that had just come on my TBR and books that had been on it ages. Okay, graphs, come to me! Okay, let's start with star ratings. Before I've had these in bar charts, but you guys have told me that it's easier for you to see in pie charts, so everything I think almost is in pie charts. So this year I had 29 five stars, which I'm happy with. I feel like 29 five stars is pretty good. We had seven 4.5s, 32 four stars, 23.5s. I should probably scoot over a bit, hang on. 25 three stars, seven 2.5s, eight two stars, three 1.5s, and one one star, which was really a DNF, but I felt so vindictive towards it that I just got a one star. So let's chat about genre. This one's interesting. I haven't really looked at these graphs before I'm coming and speaking to you because I kind of want to react to them naturally. So I read one classic, seven contemporary, 27 fantasy, three graphic novel, seven historical, 13 horror, one humor, three magical realism, 27 mystery, 11 non-fiction, eight romance, eight sci-fi, and 16 thriller. So yeah, it checks out the fantasy and mystery are my top two genres. They are the genres I read the most. I feel like I didn't consciously read as much fantasy this year, but thinking about it, maybe I read a lot of series. Like I finished a lot of series and a lot of them were probably fantasy series. So I reckon a lot of my fantasy reading was parts of series, if that makes sense. I feel like 11 non-fiction is pretty good. That's like my fifth most common genre, which isn't bad. Like I feel like that's pretty good. I don't know. I did. I feel like I set a non-fiction goal at the start. Yeah, I haven't reacted to my goals yet. I would be doing that next week and seeing how I did, but I feel like I set a goal to read 12. But like 11 is close enough. I'm pretty happy with that. Okay. I'm surprised actually I read equal amounts of fantasy and mystery. I feel like if I were to make a prediction next year, maybe more mystery. I feel like mystery is what I feel the pull towards, but also there's not like as many mystery books out there as I feel like as fantasy. Do you know what I mean? There's more to choose from for fantasy. Let's chat about the format in which I read the books. 13 were audiobooks, 5 were ebooks, 64 were what I call mixed media, and 50 were physical. So mixed media is typically when I have the physical book and the audiobook and I read them together. That was something I- especially the first half of the year, I feel like every book that I read, I had to have the audiobook as well in order to like make sense of what was happening. I found it just harder to read at the start of the year. My brain was a little bit foggier. I've been trying, I think, more towards the latter half of the year to just read physically if I can because it is- I mean, I have script. I love script. And if I have- if the audiobook of a book is on script, that I'm reading, I will probably listen to it because it's just easy. But getting lots of audiobooks on Audible, when I already have the physical book, I don't need to do that. But I do love that reading experience, especially if a book, you know, I've heard has a great audiobook. You know, thinking of things like True Crime Story this year, there's been loads of books where I feel like having the physical and the audiobook really enhanced my reading experience. So I don't regret it, but I think it's just interesting. This shows that I love reading mixed media. In terms of audience, I read 97 adult, 1 children, 6 middle grades, and 28 YA. So really starting to skew towards adult books now. I feel like that's been one of the biggest changes with my reading this year is starting to read a lot more adult books than YA. I feel like I've been pulling away from YA a little bit. I don't know. I think when I first got back into reading, I read a lot of YA, but I feel like I've been getting into problems with YA where I don't know if it's just the YA I've been picking up. It's not exactly a massive sample size this year, but I've been reading some that just feels like I don't like the writing. I don't think they're particularly well written. That is so mean. I have this problem sometimes when YA reads really young and I don't think it works. I don't have that problem with middle grade. I never feel like, oh, this middle grade reads young. I don't like it. But some of the YA I've been picking up, I wonder if I've been saying it reads young. It's hot and conflating that with bad writing. Because I don't want to say a book is poorly written often. I feel like that's mean, but maybe I'm using it as a synonym. I don't know. But I feel like, yeah, I haven't been loving a lot of YA I've been picking up. I have got some YA I'm excited to read, but even just looking at my TBR cart, I feel like there's a lot of adult books and a lot of YA. So that has definitely been a new skew this year. In terms of where I got the books from, I only read one book that I got from a book box this year. Oh my god. 16 from Book of the Month, which is actually more than I thought it would be. I read quite a lot of Book of the Month. 34 were gifted to me. 4 were from Kindle Unlimited. 46 were books I owned and bought myself. 1 was from Audible. 14 were from the publisher. And 5 were from Scribd. So books I own myself and books I'm gifted are always going to be the two biggest categories, I would say here. 14 from the publisher is still quite a lot, considering I don't really request books from publishers anymore. I just, it just feels like a lot of pressure for me. Like when I see, because I like separate them in my spreadsheet, if they've been sent to me or if I bought them myself. And I just feel a lot of pressure to read a book quickly if I got sent it by the publisher. And that pressure means I just don't read it quickly. I just like push it out of my brain. I don't know, I'm not very good at it. So I just don't tend to like, if a publisher reaches out to me and says, would you like this book? And it's a book I'm really excited for, I will bite their hand off. But I don't reach out anymore and request books. I'd rather think I just buy them myself when they come out, rather than feeling that guilt that I've put on myself. But Book of the Month, I read quite a lot from this year as well, which was surprising. Because I only started working with them, when did I start working with Book of the Month? Like mid to end of last year, I think. Mid to end of 2021. So yeah, I've worked with them all through 2022 and I love Book of the Month. I love the selections. I love the books I get from them. So yeah, I read 16 Book of the Month. Gimme. We are almost at the end. Let's talk about series. So 35 books I read this year were partway through series. 13 were first in the series, but I did not continue all of those series. If you've watched my series wrap up of the year, yeah, I didn't continue with 13 series. Some of those I've DNFed. And 84 were standalone. So go Megan. I wonder what this was last year. Can I find that out? No, I don't think I was tracking that last year. So I'm wondering how it compares, but I think that's something I started tracking this year. Okay, I didn't have first in a series or partway through series. But last year, 56% were standalones and 43% were part of a series. So a much bigger chunk of my reading was part of a series. Well, not much bigger, but bigger chunk of my reading was part of a series. But a lot of those were first in a series. So I really feel like I've done a good job this year of prioritizing standalones and prioritizing books that are partway through a series. And then finally, our final chart. We got through this quickly. In terms of author status, 17 were debuts, 65 were authors I'd read from before, and 50 were new to me. So it's pretty much a 50-50 split between authors I read from before and authors I haven't, because obviously debuts I haven't read from before. So I feel like that's a split I always like to have. I always like to be, you know, discovering new authors, but also really trying to carry on reading the releases of authors that I've loved before and really enjoyed. So I'm pretty happy with that split. So that is all of my reading statistics of 2022. I hope you enjoyed going through that with me. I love going through the statistics. So yeah, let me know. I would really love to know if there's anything you'd like me to track next year, because if there is, I kind of need to start doing it now as I begin my spreadsheet. So if there's any info that I didn't go through there that you would like me to track for this time next year, please let me know. But yeah, here's to an amazing 2023. I can finally say happy new year to you because it's finally the new year for me. In my last video, it wasn't. So I feel like good vibes for 2023. And I feel like looking there, there's a few things that I'm super happy with in terms of my reading for 2022 and some things that I would like to grow and improve. So next week, we will see my goals. We'll react to my 2022 goals and then we'll set my 2023 goals. And then I think that's all of the kind of 2022 reflection content done. And we're just into 2023. I'm very excited. If you got into the end, comment. Is that like, I feel like it's a bar chart emoji. Yeah, comment the bar chart emoji if you got to the end. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye.