One the main reasons I make sure I record every book I read through Goodreads is because I like the way they organise your end of year reading stats. It saves me having to do my own spreadsheet and then there’s the way they collect all the covers of the books you’ve read. I’m a very visual person so this appeals greatly. With switching off from blogging this year between Christmas and New Year, it just occured to me that I hadn’t done my annual reading reflection yet. I do these posts for myself more than anything, just for that look back at what I read and how many books, etc. It’s less about meeting targets and more about enjoying the reflection.
I did set a target of 130 books so Goodreads was commiserating to me and wishing me ‘better luck next year’. Whatever. The target was arbitrary, I never aim for it.
As you can see by my average rating, 2020 was a year of reading good books. It did feel that way as I was going along, so it’s nice to see this confirmed.
I have noticed each new year that I am shying away from longer books more and more. I think the most obvious reason for this is that it means longer between reviews and that sense of obligation kicks in (obligation to publishers to read more books faster, obligation to followers to publish reviews more often). This isn’t something I get hung up on, but when I see stats like this I can’t help but acknowledge that gravitation towards shorter books.
And now we have the books I read, so I’ll finish up here and thank you all for reading the reviews I wrote on them.
Cheers to a new year of reading! 🥂📚
Theresa Smith Writes 
Brilliant reading! I agree with your comment on shorter books, I disappeared down the rabbit hole with Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling “Troubled Blood” and still not sure about a rating for it 🙂 Happy New Year!
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Happy New Year!
I’ve never read any Robert Galbraith. I stopped with JK Rowling after Harry Potter.
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Loved your 2020 reading wrap up. It’s funny though, I always worry about publishing too many posts on my blog, concerned that my subscribers will get sick of getting too many emails. And you worry about subscribers wanting more posts! Strange huh?
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The only thing I ever worry about with too much posting is more than once a day – such as today! I hate the idea of banging out posts all on the one day. Normally I never do it but this was an after thought post because of my blogging break, so I made an exception.
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It’s great that you don’t get hung up on meeting the “target”, after all, reading is supposed to be fun. The stats are always interesting. I actually do keep a spreadsheet, only because I like to keep a record of more aspects than you get with Goodreads. Interesting that you feel yourself gravitating towards shorter books. Something perhaps authors might like to take note of. We don’t all have time to read a lot of bricks.
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There’s not a lot of contemporary authors I can think of that can sustain writing a brick nowadays either, to be honest, without it feeling like it’s dragging at some point. Fifteen years ago though, the thicker the better. But thicker books were more common back then too.
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Hmm, true. Many of the bricks that I own or have read do tend to fall into the fantasy/sci fi camp. I guess not so much world building is required in contemporary novels.
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You used to get it in historical fiction a fair bit too
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Congratulations on a great year of reading!
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Thanks Shelleyrae! 😊
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I love the visual appeal of the Goodreads wrap-ups, too! And it always reveals interesting things about my reading that year that I might not have seen otherwise. I’ve been steering away from longer books too, but I think that’s because 2020 was a very restless year for me. I didn’t want to get stuck in one story for too long, I preferred to flit around books-wise and keep myself entertained with novelty. Putting a couple of longer books on my TBR for 2021 to even things out 😉
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That restlessness you mention makes me think of myself with my reading in the last few months. Although I have unpacked a few chunksters that I’d really like to read so hopefully I can settle this year and get sone serious reading done.
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