In 2020, I read a grand total of 202 books, including ARCs, audiobooks, and comic books. I'm genuinely blown away by this number and I don't really think I'll ever be able to get even close to it again. Obviously, adding in all of my comic books helped to get the total past 200 and that might do the trick in the future. Also new for this year was audiobooks, which I listened to while cooking and cleaning, as well as working on my bujo. The pandemic also gave me more time to read than in previous years, when I was working around 30 hours a week, so once everything normalizes my reading time will go back to a more reasonable amount.
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| My 2020 shelves |
Something I started this past year, is keeping track of my read books not only on Goodreads and on this blog, but also on a spreadsheet. I used the template Fadwa from word wonders shared here. I love this because it gives me back as much information as I put into it. I've been able to keep better track of diverse books I read since the spreadsheet has a couple of rows to describe any representation in the book, I'm able to stay on top of series' I'm in the process of reading, and any ARCs I receive. I'll share a few of the statistics from 2020 here, but let me know in the comments down below if you'd want to read a separate post about the spreadsheet itself and how I use it.
I still mainly read actual physical books, but like I said above audiobooks were a completely new category for this year. I also subscribed to Scribd while they had their free one month trial going on during the beginning of quarantine, which is why I have more ebooks than before when I would only read ARCs as ebooks.
The author status percentages are one of the stats I'm most disappointed in. I would love to read more books from debut authors and authors that are otherwise new to me. Unfortunately, this most likely won't change too much in 2021 as my main reading goal is to cut down on my own physical backlog of unread books.
The publication years of my reads doesn't surprise me too much since I knew I was reading mainly new releases and in my courses this year we didn't read any full texts so there weren't any older classics to throw off the data. This year as I try to get through my backlog there should be more "older" books scattered in there, but here by older I mean books published in the 2010-2015 range. Almost a third of the books I read in 2020 were published in 2020, and if I'm able to keep to my goal I shouldn't have that many new releases this year.
Finally, as always, I wanted to share which books were my favorites of the year. These are in no particular order, other than vaguely in the order I read them in. A few of these books I read as ARCs, some I just picked up randomly, and others had been on my tbr for quite some time already. I decided on sharing my top 20, which is more than I've shared in previous years, because I read more in 2020 than I have in any previous year.
- Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
- Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
- Scythe by Neal Shusterman
- The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
- House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
- Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
- Where Dreams Descend by Janella Angeles
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martina
- The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
- When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole
- Majesty by Katharine McGee
- The Wicked + the Divine by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson, and Clayton Cowles
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
- The Deep by Rivers Solomon
- All Systems Red by Martha Wells
- The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood
What were some of your favorite books of 2020?
Until next time,
Laura
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