Welcome to day seven of blogmas, and my first blog post of 2022! Today, I am sharing all of my reading stats from 2021, and checking if I met my 2021 reading goals.
I read a total of 149 books this year, averaging 12.4 books a month. 40 of those books were audiobooks, and 8 of them were re-reads. In addition, I DNFed 7 books. According to Goodreads, the average length of my books this year was 318 pages, and my average rating was 3.7 stars.
My Reading Statistics
- 85% of the books I read were fiction, while 15% were nonfiction
- 66% of my books were adult, 32% were young adult, and 2% were middle grade or children’s
- 87% of the books I read were written by women
- Only two of the books I read were written by nonbinary authors, and I read a total of 4 books by trans authors
- I read 43 queer books, meaning they comprised 29% of the books I read this year
- I also read 62 books written by authors of color, making up about 42% of the books I read
Did I meet my 2021 Reading Goals?
Goal 1: Have 30% of my books be by authors of color
30% was a low ball goal that I set for myself at the end of the year, with a high ball goal of 50%. In the end, I hit just about right in the middle with 42%! I am overall pretty happy with this number, and I am also glad that I had this goal to keep me accountable
Goal 2: Read more books from my physical tbr
By physical tbr, I meant books that I already purchased that I still needed to read. So books that I bought and then read this year I did not count toward this, even if they were physical books. It was all about clearing out my tbr. In the end, I read 21 books from my physical tbr this year, which I don’t think is too bad. If I can read 20 more books from my phsical tbr in 2022, I would be happy.
Goal 3: Read 3 “classics”
I did manage to do this! I made this goal because I wanted to push myself to read “harder” books, and to read books that are part of the “canon” just because they are good to know. In the end, I read 3 Jane Austen books this year, which I think totally meets this goal. I also read what might be considered more “modern classics” for my Harlem Renaissance English class that I took this Fall.
Goal 4: Read 70 books/Read 150 books
It is safe to say that I completed the first part of this! Even though I read a lot of books last year, I genuinely never have any idea how much time I am going to have to read, so I low-balled myself with an initial goal of 70 books. However, I met that goal before we were even halfway through the year, so I set a personal, second goal to reach 150 books. I actually got 149, but I am still very happy with that.
So while it appears that I mostly set myself up with some low expectations, I did meet all my 2021 reading goals! More importantly, I am personally really happy with my reading year. I read so many amazing books, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone to read more nonfiction and literary fiction, and I diversified my reading a lot by reading more books by authors of color.
Now that I have wrapped up all my 2021 reading, I will be looking forward to the 2022 reading year in future blogmas posts! Thanks for reading, I hope you are having a happy new year so far!
Reading with Delaney 