I have to say, I've been looking forward all month to writing some end-of-year blog posts. This one will focus on the statistics for the books I've read this year. I'm not a math major by any means, but perhaps I've inherited something of my mother's love for the subject, as is shown by my enjoyment of figuring out the percentages and graphs seen here.
Totals
Total number of books read each month:
January - 7
February - 6
March - 14
April - 8
May - 10
June - 14
July - 8
August - 7
Septemer - 5
October - 5
November - 5
December - 8
Number of books read over the entire year: 97
Total number of books attempted, but put down: 10
Percentage of books started and completed: 91%
Books being read, but not completed, at the end of 2020: 3
Percentage of completed books read on my Kindle: 17% (17 books total)
Percentage of books that were rereads: 13% (13 books total)
My Reflections
It looks like for every 10 books I started, I put down about one for various reasons. Some were discarded because of lack of interest; others because I didn't like the way they affected my thoughts.
One interesting data point was the percentage of books that I read on my Kindle: 17%. That's almost one out of every five books. Some of the ebooks were available because of the Kindle Unlimited service I accessed for free for a while; these will not be available to me this year because I refuse to pay for the service. Several ebooks were accessed through the Formed.org site, while others were public domain books that were required for the two classes I audited in the fall semester. A final selection of ebooks were picked from Gutenberg press because I had no other way of accessing those public domain books (which are largely unavailable through my local public library system). As much as I like having a physical book to read, it seems that having a Kindle really opened up reading possibilities for me. I looked at my list and noticed that not a single one of the books I put in the "spiritual works" genre was an ebook. Perhaps I have so many laying around that I need to read through them first, before I dive into more of what is available on Formed.org. Or, maybe I know I might want to have access to them later in life, so I figured that I better just buy the book now. Either way, it was not a tendency of mine that I noticed until just now.
Genre Data
I broke up the books I read into the following genres: Spiritual Works, Fiction, [Auto]Biography, Literary Criticism/Nonfiction/Philosophy, and Other. The penultimate genre is obviously a "catchall" designation for genres for which I did not read enough books to merit a distinct group. Some subdivisions exist within the larger genres of Spiritual Works and Fiction. This first graph has NO overlap; each book goes into one genre, no more.
These next two graphs depict the genres from which I read the most books: Spiritual Works and Fiction. There IS overlap, meaning that some books ended up in several sections. The results may not be the most accurate, therefore, but I wanted to reflect that some books were hard to parse into very specific pigeonholes.
It looks like I read more books that were "straight theology", or had elements of that, than I read of apologetics or lives of the saints. I like theology more, but I think that it would probably be good for me to increase my intake of apologetical works since I'm pretty timid about sharing my faith.
Half of the books I read were geared specifically towards children or young adult audiences. That number would be even higher without the overlap - most of the works of fantasy and all of the historical fiction books were in that demographic, but they are counted again in their own genres. The fact that I read so many children's books probably explains why I was able to read nearly a hundred books this year - being shorter and with less technical language, they were for the most part quicker reads than books in other genres.
My Reflections
It took a long time for me to figure the data for the whole year. I had to refer back to the individual blog posts multiple times, and check my list twice to make sure my total book number was correct. I might try in the coming year to somehow mark on the bracket which books are rereads, or read on the Kindle.
I think it would be awesome to reach 100 books read next year, but I wonder if that is a feasible goal. My numbers for this year benefited from reading several series of children's books that were quick reads (Sarah, Plain and Tall; The Chronicles of Narnia), and I don't know if I'll be so lucky this year. All the same, it is a good number to work towards!
Best of Genre
I didn't have each genre fight it out in a bracket, but I did go through and pick out the best book in each of the following sections. I did not have overlap (otherwise, Little T's book would have won in at least three genres).
Spiritual Work: The Story of a Soul, by St. Therese of Lisieux
Fiction (Classics): Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell
Fiction (Historical): The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary SutcliffFiction (Fantasy): The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis
[Auto]Biography: Tolkien, by Humphrey Carpenter
Literary Criticism/Nonfiction/Philosophy: The Enchanted Hour, by Meghan Cox Gurdon
Reread: The Light Princess, by George MacDonald
Monthly Winners
January: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (not depicted on the blog)
February: The Magician's Nephew
March: The World's First Love
April: The Light Princess
May: Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
June: Tolkien
July: Wives and Daughters, The Noonday Devil: Acedia
August: The Eagle of the Ninth
September: The Spiritual Exercises
October: The Thief
November: My Bondage and My Freedom
December: The Story of a Soul
There are 13 winners here because I still have trouble deciding between "Wives and Daughters" and "The Noonday Devil: Acedia". Seven of the winning books were fiction; four were spiritual works; the last two were nonfiction.
2020 Winner Book Bracket
Here is the moment we've waited for all year! It's time to decide which book was the best one that I read this year. The bracket is based on the winning book[s] from each month.
The big winner of this year was a reread: "The Story of a Soul". The bracket may have been influenced by the recent reading of the winning book, but I believe the legitimate qualities of the book gained it the victory. Therese wrote in a way that was very approachable, but beautiful. It conveyed her personality and her love with great clarity, and the resonance of some passages reduced me to tears. It goes to show that a great book is great even after coming back to it after a long, long time.
Final Thoughts for 2020
I'm a little disappointed I didn't reach 100, but I read some amazing books this year! I really enjoyed tracking my reads in a blog and found myself looking forward to the end of each month. I intend to continue this project and engage books at this new level.
