When I was setting my reading goal this year for my Goodreads challenge, I decided that I would set it low, at 2 books per week, for a total of 104 books. I knew that I would probably read more than that number, but I was also vaguely planning to read some more challenging books this year, so I wanted to keep the goal reasonable. This plan was both successful and unsuccessful, as I hit that 104 book target at exactly the mid-year point of July 1, 2022.
So, here are some stats for you:
Overview:
Books read so far in 2022: 109, with 106 finishes and 3 DNFs. I’ve written 46 reviews so far, books in 35 different series, and 44 stand-alones. I’ve read a total of 73 different authors, 34,032 pages and have an average rating of 3.81 for the books I’ve rated. I’m on track to read 207 books this year.
Page length of books.
Genres:
My most read genres are, as always, crime (44)/mystery (40). Because some of my books are entered as both, I don’t exactly know the number of books. It’s too late for me to screw around with the genres for this year, but I’ve already decided I’m going to tweak my genre categories in 2023 and figure out a mechanism by which I separate out crime, mystery, suspense and thriller. These are all overlapping genres and I’d like to have a paradigm under which I assign a single genre to each book I finish to make the genre categories more meaningful. After crime/mystery, the next most read genres are fiction (23) and fantasy (13).
Here is a full breakdown of the genre categories.
| Name | Books Read | Reviews Written | Average Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| classic | 12 | 8 | 4.33 Stars |
| crime | 44 | 15 | 3.55 Stars |
| essays | 3 | 2 | 3.83 Stars |
| fantasy | 13 | 4 | 4.25 Stars |
| fiction | 23 | 13 | 4 Stars |
| gothic | 1 | 0 | 3.5 Stars |
| historical fiction | 5 | 1 | 4 Stars |
| magical realism | 1 | 0 | 4 Stars |
| memoir | 11 | 5 | 3.82 Stars |
| mystery | 40 | 19 | 3.6 Stars |
| non-fiction | 9 | 4 | 4.13 Stars |
| religion | 2 | 0 | 4.25 Stars |
| romance | 2 | 0 | 3 Stars |
| supernatural | 1 | 1 | 4 Stars |
| suspense | 9 | 4 | 3.67 Stars |
| thriller | 7 | 4 | 3.86 Stars |
| translated fiction | 1 | 0 | 4 Stars |
| YA | 8 | 4 | 4.06 Stars |
Additional analytics:
I’ve been tracking a number of additional analytics this year, including publication year. So far, I’ve read the largest number of books from 4 decades: 1950’s (14), 1970’s (7), 2010’s (19) and 2020’s (20), but I’ve read at least one book in every decade for the last 100 years (1920 through 2020). I’ve read 4 translated books – 1 from Danish, 1 from Swedish and 2 from French (both Maigret books).
85 of the 109 books were new to me, 21 were rereads. My rereads (not surprisingly) received a slightly higher average rating – 4.05 – than my new reads – 3.76.
In terms of format, 3 of the books were audio books, 60 were kindle books & 44 were print books. With respect to gender of the author, 78 were written by women to 30 written by men (72% to 38%).
Of my various reading projects, my progress is:
Project Breakdown
| Name | Books Read | Reviews Written | Average Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| a century of crime | 4 | 4 | 3.38 Stars |
| a century of women | 17 | 13 | 4.06 Stars |
| American mystery classics | 2 | 2 | 3.75 Stars |
| appointment with agatha | 4 | 2 | 4 Stars |
| back to the classics | 4 | 4 | 4.13 Stars |
| classics club round 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 Stars |
| furrowed middlebrow | 2 | 1 | 4.25 Stars |
| golden age mystery | 3 | 2 | 3.33 Stars |
| inspector alleyn files | 1 | 1 | 3.5 Stars |
| Mt. TBR 2022 | 15 | 5 | 4.1 Stars |
Some of the books may overlap or do double duty here.
The last piece of statistical information that I track is the source of my books. I have 3 primary book sources: my personal library (39 of the books were from this source), the Kindle Unlimited library (13 books from here) and the public library (55 books were library check outs).
So, there’s an update of my reading progress so far in 2022.
In terms of substantive content, my plans did get a little bit derailed a couple of times. In mid-April, I got obsessed with bizarre cult memoirs and read five or six of them, covering the Westboro Baptist Church, Warren Jeffs and his sect of FLDS, the LeBaron FLDS sect in Mexico and one concerning a fundamentalist offshoot of the Baptist church. These were gripping and disturbing, complicated and harrowing stories of child abuse, brainwashing, and virulent misogyny and homophobia and misogyny. Reading them made me feel vaguely dirty, as though I were gawking at a fatal car accident. Nonetheless, they had an addictive quality.
The second derailing was less icky – in late may, I picked up a book by Melinda Leigh. She has three series that are available through the KU library and I mainlined 7 books from the three series. I read her entire Bree Taggert series to date, one of her first romantic suspense series, Scarlet Falls, (which I found decidedly meh) and one of a different series, the Morgan Dane series, which I also found underwhelming. I will not go back to Scarlet Falls because it is way too romance-y for my taste; I may give Morgan Dane a follow-up try. The next Bree Taggert comes on in January, and I will definitely read that one. These are very basic mystery/thrillers, but are reasonably well-written, free and a lot of fun. I also picked up some additional KU crime novels – two by Joy Ellis from the Jackman and Evans series, and a couple of one offs from other series that I may, or may not, return to down the road.
I also have not felt like blogging, so I’m way behind on reviews. I generally don’t try to catch up once I get this far behind. I have entered all of the books into the database, so if I want to write some reviews, it will be easy. But I’m just going to continue to go with the flow and not try to force things.