2020 By the Numbers, and 2021 In My Sights : Stats and Faves

This is going to be a very cut, dry, boring post, for those who are not as completely enraptured by the sound of my hopes and dreams hitting the pavement as I am. 

For the first time in my reading life, I have missed my Goodreads Challenge total goal. 

By ELEVEN BOOKS. 

While I have the utmost regard for anyone who's been able to call 2020 their "best reading year ever" - including my baby brother, who upped his annual goal twice over, from 20 to 60, after it became clear that the only things shaping his senior year of high school were to be a global pandemic and his ability to distract himself with High Fantasy content - it was definitely not the case for me. If I set a record in anything this year, it was number of hours logged into mindlessly doomscrolling various corners of social media, or the total volume of Nerds Ropes eaten in numb disbelief as I did so. 

Still, it's the end of the year, and as the clock has run out, so have my chances of making up that last-ditch deficit. So, here's the numbers for what I actually did manage to read:

the stats 

Pages Read: 15,012

Total Books Read: 49... sort of. 

(I also read 12 romance novels of various stripes that were not included in my Goodreads Challenge, as well as 12 cookbooks, approximately 6 of which probably took more time and attention than many of the books that did make it onto my Goodreads Challenge, as well.) 

Shortest Read: The Silent Gondoliers, William Goldman, at 128 pages

Longest Read: Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2), Libba Bray, at 613 pages

My total average book length was only a little over 300 pages. 

My most popular read of the year - shared by the highest number of other Goodreads users - was Normal People, by Sally Rooney, I book I really didn't like at all. 

My average star rating across the year was a 4.2, which feels kind of disheartening in retrospect. I know I read some I really loved, but I don't think the overall year of experience warrants something that high. 

Best Reading Months: April and May, with approximately 8 and 9 books each!

Best Romances I Didn't Include in Goodreads Challenge: Sarah MacLean's The Bareknuckled Bastards trilogy... well, at least the first two books. (Look out for the review of the full series later on this Winter.) 

Opinion that has changed the most since I read it: The First Time: Finding Myself and Looking for Love on Reality TV, by Bachelor alum Colton Underwood. Being publicly outed as a stalking, harassing, tracking-locator-planting creep of an ex-boyfriend can definitely lead to reshaped feelings about your memoirs on finding love. 

Best Reread: How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher. A master of her craft and beloved culinary literature fixture for a reason. No wolves were harmed in the making of this book, either, in case you were worried. 

Unexpected Favorite Series: Best American Food Writing. As a kid, I couldn't stomach essay collections, and as an adult, it's one of my favorite formats. This annual collection of various culinary publications - from traditional magazine publishing, to blog posts, to book forwards, and more - is something I've read multiple installments of throughout the year. 

my top ten books of the year

January: The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

February: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb

March: How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher

April: My Life with the Saints, Fr. James Martin, SJ

May: Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows #2), Leigh Bardugo

June: Redshirts, John Scalzi

July: Beka Cooper: Terrier, Tamora Peirce

August: Liar's Club, Mary Karr

September: Paperback Crush, Gabrielle Moss

October: In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4), Seanan McGuire

November: Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

December: Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies, Vicky Zimmerman

And my top three of the bunch have got to be: 

So, that's all of the books I did manage to read in 2020, but what about the books I'm planning on reading in the new year? While my TBR stack continues to grow - and my shelves are populated by nearly 200 books I have never read - I've got plenty of ideas, but I'm going nowhere fast if my reading habits stay the same as they were this past year. Here are some changes I'm going to be taking into account for my Goodreads Challenge and bookish hobbies in 2021. 

1. I'm massively lowering my Goodreads Challenge. 

Well, not massively. But it feels massive to me. I've steadily built up my Goodreads Challenge on a yearly basis, never backtracking, simply moving forward or staying at the same level. So it feels a little strange to be giving myself so much room... I'm trying to be positive, and say that this will give me more opportunities to pick up heftier titles I'd otherwise ignore, or that I can always raise the goal higher later, but I'd be lying if I said that this choice wasn't at least partially motivated by the fact that I'm afraid of missing my goal again. (Turning a positive habit into a toxic personal standard? Maybe. But if you saw the pressure I put myself through to make homemade dinners five days a week, you'd know it's not the only arena in which I do that sort of thing.)  

2. I'm making the choice to review and record both my Cookbook and Romance reads on Goodreads, no matter how embarrassed I am about having people I know in real life aware of the dual facts that I enjoy both food and love. 

Mainly, this is a result of two factors: 1. had I included the romance novels I read in my Goodreads Challenge total, I would have finished a full title ahead of my 2020 goal, and 2. my younger brother - one of my primary motivations in life - thinks I'm an absolute weenie for not choosing to do so already. I'm fully aware that stripping out these large populations of my reading life only gives credence to the ideas that they're worth less as reading material, and those are beliefs that I wholeheartedly reject in my personal life, as well. It's time to start putting my reviews where my mouth is. 

3. I'm trying - trying! - to spend less time on social media. 

This is motivated by a truly superfluous amount of factors, but in a large way, has a lot to do with both my personal attention span, and the fact that I just genuinely do not enjoy a lot of the content I engage with regularly online. I'll get trapped in a four-hour time-suck spiral of looking at screenshots of Reddit "AITA" forums on Instagram, and emerge not only wholly dissatisfied, but feeling all the dumber for it. It's time to unhook the talons of my predatory iPhone from my frontal lobe, and reclaim my ability to get through an extra chapter before bed again. 

(And in case you're wondering about my Cookbook challenge from this year - which I only semi-documented on the blog - look for a major recap coming up sometime in the next couple of weeks!)

How did your reading goals shake out in 2020? What were some of your favorite reads of the year? Let me know, in the comments below!