2022 Bookish stats

My year end reading stats:*

Overview:

My total books read was 214. My first book of the year was Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper and my last book of the year was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. There were 171 first time reads and 38 rereads.

Author information:

140 of the books I read were written by women, 69 by men, which means I read twice as many books by women as by men. This is probably in line with most years, since my reads are heavily weighted towards women authors. In terms of author diversity, I didn’t do very well, with 5 books by Black authors and one each Native American, Hispanic and Indian.

I tracked author nationality as best I could. This sometimes required some guess work. I typically assigned an author to a country based upon their birth location. I see a couple of obvious blind spots in my reading, since I read nothing by an author from Asia, and just two books written by African authors.

Genre:

I haven’t really established a good way to track genres. For most of the year, I used crime & mystery both as genre assignments; next year, I’m just going to use one of the two because there is so much overlap. I plan to only assign a book to one genre so I can avoid the issue I have with determining genre: many books were assigned to multiple genres, which makes it hard to figure out what I was actually reading.

However, I read by far the most crime/mystery, with 106 assigned to crime and 101 assigned to mystery. These are probably mostly doubled up; other genres that had significant numbers are: classics (16), fantasy (22), fiction (39), nonfiction (16), and suspense/thriller (16).

Publishers:

In terms of publishers, Minotaur and Atria were the most common.  I read 10 books published by Minotaur – and they received a big boost at the end of the year when I was catching up on Chief Inspector Gamache & read three of their books in a row. Atria publishes the Cork O’Connor series by William Kent Krueger, and I also caught up on that series this year.

Other publishers that had a significant presence: Dean Street Press had a total of 8 books, between their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint and their Golden Age mysteries. They also got a boost in December, when I read 8 books for DSP December. I read 6 NYRB classics this year, and 8 by Open Road Media.

Publication year:

I tracked my books by publication decade this year, with the results below. As you can see, I almost half of the books that I read in 2022 were published in the 2000’s and the other half were published during the twentieth century. I only had 3 that were published in the 19th century.

Books in translation:

I want to read more books in translation. In 2022, I only read 14 books that have been translated into English from another language, and 8 of those were from French. Those are all the new Maigret translations that have been published by Penguin. You can expect more of them for next year.

Translated from Breakdown

So, that wraps up my 2022 reading year! If you are interested in which books were my favorites, I posted that list yesterday.

*All of my statistics rely upon accurate entries into my book library, so there will definitely be discrepancies in numbers where I have mis-assigned a book or made some sort of an entry error.