2020 Reading Stats

“It was almost sweet the way they worried about me.”

First line in Galatea by Madeline Miller

We’ve made it to my final “end-of-the-year” post where I’m going to throw a lot of numbers at you. I often wonder how interesting these stats posts are to other people, but I love doing them and that’s all that matters. I’ll try to make it interesting.

In 2020, I read 28,526 pages across 64 books. Apparently, I’m a creature of habit because those numbers for 2019 were 28,756 pages across 63 books. Should I set myself the challenge of guessing the exact number of pages I read in 2021? Looks like it shouldn’t be that hard 😅.

My average rating for the year was 3.7 out of 5. That doesn’t say a whole lot as the average rating of so many books is bound to land somewhere around the middle. Here is a more detailed overview of my rating (as I have rounded up or down on Goodreads):

• 5 ⭐: 19 books
• 4 ⭐: 19 books
• 3 ⭐: 11 books
• 2 ⭐: 9 books
• 1 ⭐: 2 books
• No rating: 4 books

Note that six of the 5-star books were rereads, but that still leaves me with 13 new 5 star reads. I’m very satisfied with that.
As something very rare for me, I also had two DNF’s this year, but they weren’t rated and only counted towards the number of pages read. That left my average book length at 439 pages. I read a lot of big books in 2020.

I see other bloggers making fancy pie charts for the genres they’ve read in 2020. But I did the math and realized my pie chart would be very boring as I read 75% fantasy. Remember how I talked about being a creature of habit? Can you guess how much fantasy I read in 2019? Yes, that’s right, 75%. And just I case you were wondering, my second and third most popular genres in 2020 were Science Fiction and Historical Fiction. That has changed from last year when Contemporary was my second most popular. In 2020, I only read two contemporaries, and one of those was a graphic novel. It really wasn’t something I had planned, and I still consider the genre to be one I like. However, I’ve read a lot more historical fiction novels in 2020, so I think those were the ones I turned to instead whenever I needed a break from fantasy. I’m not mad about that because those books were some of my favorites of the year.

I do have a pie chart, though, that shows whether I primarily read books by female or male authors:

Please note that I read one book by a genderfluid author. But as the chart shows, I clearly have a preference, and it isn’t all that surprising to me. Since I started reading as a child, I’ve always felt that I preferred books by female authors. To check that statement, I calculated my average rating for both genders: my average rating for male authors were 3.6 and 3.8 for the female authors.
Not a huge difference, but enough to confirm that I shouldn’t actively take steps to change this ratio.

In terms of age demographic, I’m mainly interested in the ratio between YA and Adult. The chart looks like this:

That looks exactly like I want it to. A fairly even divide, but a bit more adult. In 2019, YA was in the lead with 56%, so it’ll be interesting to see if YA will continue to diminish, but I don’t think so.

Lastly, I’ll finish this off with some quick, fun stats:

📚 The highest rated book on Goodreads that I read in 2020 was Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (4.73 stars)

📚 The most popular book on Goodreads that I read in 2020 was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (happens when you do rereads)

📚 The least popular book on Goodreads that I read in 2020 was The Nephilim Protocol by J. D. Kloosterman

📚 According to Storygraph, I read most slow-paced books (22 books) and least fast-paced books (15)

📚 The shortest book I read was Galatea by Madeline Miller (20 pages)

📚 The longest book I read was Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (1,220 pages)

I think that’s all the interesting things I had to say about my 2020 reading statistics. I’m quite satisfied with everything, which is a good thing because if there’s one thing we’ve learned today, it is that I’m automatically going to read the exact same way in 2021. Hope you all have a great reading year!