Reading Year in Review | 2020 Book Stats

hi friends it's kayla welcome to my final wrap-up of the year everything i read in 2020 how it went i'm going to organize all of these books in different stats we're going to do some pie charts it's going to be a good time this year i read 184 books total so let's get into it i stacked up all these books behind me just for the thumbnail they're not organized in any real specific way besides kind of color but then i found a bunch of books at the end that i remembered i read and i had to throw them on top so it threw off everything this took me a while and we're not actually going to get to look at it for very long because we're going to organize it right off the bat by something else but first let's just stare at it for a minute and then let me show you it organized in a couple different ways so here's just all of them in general i think there's probably five to ten missing from here that i couldn't get my hands on here they are if we just lay them all out on the floor all of the covers we're going to talk more about the covers later and things that show up more frequently than others and then here's what it looks like if you scroll through my goodreads i'm not sure why i wanted to do this one but you get to see all the covers but in a little more tidy of a fashion then here's my bullet journal spread this is how i mainly keep track of the books that i read i start the year with just line drawings and then i color them in as i go and then here's my monthly like instagram photo which i usually just take a photo of the stack that i read in the month and then these books i took right now of them organized by stack so they're in a little cleaner of a way and you can really compare month to month what happened i obviously read the most books in march with 30 and the least books in december with nine but that was by design an average month for me is like 15 books and what i would call like my best reading month and my worst reading month has nothing to do with the amount of books i read but how many books i loved so my best reading month would actually be july where i read nine five star books i saved a lot of like my queer why a for july and i loved most of them my worst reading month is technically in december with only two five stars but since i read the least amount of books that month i think the numbers are actually a little skewed because like obviously i read less books i loved in a month that i already read less books in general so if we went with the statistics my worst reading month would actually be march when i read the most amount of books because i actually only ended up reading i think six five stars that month which isn't great so our first way to organize this stack is gonna be by writing normally i would organize it by a stack of one star stack of two stars stack three four and five star but then last year i combined my one and twos because i feel like sometimes they get a little muddled for me and this year i actually decided to do something a little different and organize all of the books into three individual stacks still based on writing but it's more like books that i didn't like books that i liked and then books that i loved so in the stack on the left you'll see all of my one and two stars the stack in the middle is gonna have three stars two low fours and then the stack on the right is going to be four and a half to five stars it's nice to get to look at it this way too because i can clearly see that a third of the books that i read this year were great amazing top tier books over a third of the books were good and under a third of them were bad i read over 40 5 star books this year and then just thought it made sense to throw in the other like 20 4.5 stars i had so we could also include like thrillers and mysteries because i didn't read a lot of five stars for those but there are still a lot of really great ones i read if you've been with me the whole year thank you first of all but you will recall a lot of videos where i did not select my own tbr so i thought it would be interesting to look at those stats i'm not going to organize it into those piles but it is relevant to the rating conversation because what i learned this year is 120 of the books that i read were books already on my radar they're ones that i selected for myself i heard about from somebody and i just read because i wanted to and then 60 books that i read this year a third of my overall reading was books that i didn't pick for myself so if that stat is over here over here i'm going to compare the same thing but only regarding my five star reads if you look at the 60 to 65 books in this stack 25 of them i think were selected for me so a third of my overall reads were picked for me i didn't choose i wasn't in control but as of my favorites of the year half half of them were selected for me i just think that's really cool and justifies my weird content to me maybe it would be interesting to know which ones weren't selected for me that ended up in my least favorite stack so i will also give you that information of my least favorites which ones were selected by me and i ended up hating them and which ones were selected in other various ways and i hated them i'm guessing it's split like half and half just looking at the stack but the official numbers are on the screen right now and now i'll show you a photo of all my four and a half and five star reads because it's probably hard to pull out the titles in the stack so here they are laid out these are all of my favorites i maybe i'm organizing it kind of by genre so you can see my favorite thrillers of the year my favorite contemporaries and my favorite horror and fantasy and whatever else taking all these books into account and all of the ratings i gave out my average rating for the year was a 3.8 i've talked about for years that my rating is always a 3.7 it's always been a 3.7 it'll always be a 3.7 but i went up one decimal point and i think you can just easily see that my biggest stack is my three to four stars so like clearly this is the majority of things that i read and i'm happy with my average rating obviously i would love it to be higher but it's cool since we talked about the number of books i read we should talk about the number of pages i read which is 55 000 ish the thing with this year is i actually re-read quite a few of these books like two to three times this year and i'm not counting any of those rereads in my final number because like i just don't care and i don't want to put on goodreads that i read little women three times in one month i think 55 000 pages is pretty average for me regardless of how many books that i read in the last couple years i've always been between like 45 000 and 55 000 pages and now we're going to organize it by stacks representing how big the books were and if i read mostly short books mostly average size books mostly large books i had a goal this year to read shorter books i love novellas i love a hundred page experience and the numbers work out too a third of my reading was books under 250 pages which is awesome half of my reads were the average like 250 to 400 page book and then i think the 15 to 20 of the books i read fell into the over 400 page category and here are those final stacks i'm hot i read an average of 148 pages every day which works out to like an hour and a half of reading and then my average sized book is my favorite stat of all because in previous years it's been like my average book size has been 350 and then i think last year was 330 this year i cracked 300 and my average size book is 296 pages with my goal being reading shorter books i think i enjoy them more it should be a part of the conversation of how many of my short books got five stars all together i think there are 60 books here and there is a good portion of books that i don't rate because i read them as part of my childhood reread series so just taking into account more like the 50 books under 250 pages that i read for the first time this year 37 of the 50 were in that four and a half to five star category which is pretty cool if we look at my over 400 page stack i think this is the stack that's actually missing a couple books that i couldn't re borrow from the library in time for this video but saying there's like 25 in this stack i think 14 of them are in that four and a half to five star category which means i like big books too but the ones that weren't five stars were like one two stars i don't know what that says about anything i'm not trying to like really analyze the stats i'm just putting them out there the shortest book i read this year was 57 pages and the longest book i read this year was 777 pages since these are both classics let's organize next into genre before these books fall on me because the piles are toppling okay i need to pause and tell you how much i hate organizing by genre i'll show you what i've got so far so right now i decided to organize it this time by like most realistic to least realistic because so many of the books i read just don't fit perfectly into any category so what makes sense is there's non-fiction on the left then we move into contemporary so just like more or less current day more or less realistic stories sometimes i organize it by like contemporary romance and hard-hitting contemporary because i feel like most of the books i read aren't like light fluffy kind of books and i don't know why i do that because it doesn't matter these ones are realistic then we have thriller mystery books then we have i don't know this whole section this whole half of the table is speculative i started organizing by like full on high fantasy but there wasn't that many of them and then i wanted a stack of like realistic stories but just with like a little bit of magic but then a lot of the sci-fi that i read also fits into that little bit of weirdness or magic or unexplained stuff so then i just combined it all and we're just calling it sff and then the last category is horror which is also speculative and sometimes it's got a little sci-fi and sometimes it's got a little fantasy and sometimes it's just realistic but then i have graphic novels and like i know the graphic novels are their own category but one i'm out of space and two like some of these are speculative some of them are real life and like i want to put them in the right place i'm putting them over here and then i've got poetry which is more on this side of the board than this side of the board but sometimes it's not so again we're just going to put it over here then i've got anthologies and short story collections which is a mix some of these are super realistic some of these are pure fantasy and i know that they're their own category but like where do i what where do i put them even if they're their own category they now don't fit on what i've decided is my ranking organization guess what we're gonna put them over here my biggest struggle is the stack of historical fiction but is also fantasy and i feel like they deserve their own section so we're just gonna put them right there and then can we talk about classics because i know that there are books from the 70s and 60s but like they feel like kind of modern classics and like i heard somebody refer to a book set in the 90s as historical fiction the other day so like what what is where does this i don't know what i'm doing classics can just go over there there's there it is the stacks don't matter the numbers don't matter but what i've discovered is this year i've read more horror than normal i've read more sci-fi than normal i read more historical fiction than normal and i do think i've kind of pinpointed in what situation i can enjoy historical fiction which is a big uh growth moment for me i definitely read less mystery thrillers than normal i feel like almost half as many as i normally would with this many books involved i feel like i read the same amount of fantasy and contemporary though if you look at my numbers i think i enjoyed it's not that i enjoyed less contemporary but most of my contemporary ends up sitting in the three star range and most of my fantasy is rated either a four or two so i don't know what that means for my reading in the future but i do think you will see me reading less contemporary more fantasy going forward i'm still not the most interested in high fantasy i think i have found my niche within fantasy next up kind of related to this conversation would be what i plan to read more and less of in the future and how my reading has changed uh this year compared to others so i think we should organize next age range like intended audience so we have three categories going on the far left is going to be middle grade these are middle grade that i pick up and like read with liam some i read on my own and also the children's books or middle grades that i end up re-reading every year for my childhood reread series in the middle is going to be y a teen books and on the right is adult these are the final stacks and i'm a little bit worried that the y a one is gonna fall on me because i didn't realize how tall it would be i definitely did not organize this one well but the final numbers are sixty percent of my reading this year was adult titles thirty percent was a young adult and ten percent was middle grader children's i have just realized i'm missing a few books from here and they're definitely hiding in liam's room somewhere so i'm not gonna look for them we're already pretty deep in the video but just imagine like five more stacked there i without a doubt read more and more adult titles and less teen titles every single year this is no different i think last year i only read 20 percent more adult than young adult and this year clearly i read twice as many adult as young adult and again i think it would be fun to look at we already looked at like overall numbers this is overall what happened but what if we look at again the four and a half to five stars if we look at all of my favorite things that i read this year i actually think the stats are kind of the same it's 60 adult books got four upper fours and five stars 30 were young adult and a little bit of middle grader children's if you thought those stats were fun my favorite stat is actually the one that is authors that i've read from before versus authors i'm reading for the first time ever so let's do it that way the stats for this end up being 45 of the books i read were from authors that i've read from before and 55 were authors that i read for the very first time a lot of them were debut authors so obviously i couldn't have read from them before and like i said i think 20 of the books that i read this year i had physically read before and they were reread so they're over here my newly discovered favorite authors of the year are kay ankrum echo brown and quan berry who i read from for the very first time this year and then from authors i've read from before i have a couple favorite books from authors that i've enjoyed before so like i have a new favorite case and calendar i have a new favorite book from v e schwab i have a new favorite stephen graham jones a new favorite tiffany d jackson a new favorite nina liqueur as far as authors that i read from the most if you look back on other yearly wrap-ups there are authors that i've read five books from four books from but this year i think i only had sean mcguire who i somehow read six books from uh three stephen kings and three kiera cass those were the top authors that i read this year and then i read a whole bunch of authors twice this year but the majority of books that i was picking up it was just one book from that author tried it out some of them turned out to be my new favorites here's the stats of my top 10 books of the entire year four of my all-time favorites were from authors that i've read from before and six were brand new authors to me which is super cool if we take a look at series i think 13 of my reading this year was books involved in series whether they were sequels or the first book in a series and there isn't any other books out for a series that's been completed but i've only read the first book from here are a couple series that i started this year and ones that i plan to continue in and ones that i probably won't and then here are some sequels that i read this year there are some i enjoyed so i didn't for those rereads i think my most successful reread of the year would be middle game or charlotte's web or the secret garden those are two books that kind of surprised me that i reread from childhood and then my least successful reread was definitely flowers in the attic and the selection series they definitely were not everything that i remember i think the last organization here i want to do is based on release year because i love seeing how many brand new releases i read versus backlist or older titles and then we'll do a couple other different categories at the end this number is usually pretty perfectly split in half just like authors i've read from before and authors i haven't something also that we can look into within each one is how many of those books were already on my tbr so like i talked about there are different videos that i do where my tbr is chosen for me and i think this number is interesting to look at because 90 of the 20 20 releases that's the stack here 90 of them were already on my tbr they're ones that i had heard about i chose for myself maybe they were sent to me by the publisher but ones that i actively like wanted to read there were 80 out of the 180 so and then any book from previous years there's a hundred of them and 50 of them were already on my tbr shelf only 50 half of this stack was not on my radar not something i was interested in not something i already owned and came into my life in just various ways here they all are at the end overall like i said i read more things from the past than the present which is a stat i don't really think i have anything to share i just think it's interesting and if we look at all of the books that i read overall and like where they came from 50 of all the books that i read regardless of their new or old i bought this current year and added to my life this year about 26 of these books were not purchased by me so they were either borrowed from the library or they were sent to me by publishers and 22 percent of my overall reading this year was books that i already owned before the year begun and now we'll dive into the last couple categories based on like covers and titles and that kind of stuff i think the top way my reading has expanded this year thanks to all of you and things you recommend to me and things that i've picked up besides just more horror and sci-fi in general i think i've expanded my willingness to pick up like certain paranormal and supernatural things whether it be mermaids and sirens or vampires or ghost stories or witches and wizards i haven't loved all these books and i think i had a kind of narrow view of what a vampire story looked like or a ghost story looked like and i've definitely had my eyes open to a lot of different types of stories and i'm really excited about reading more of these things in the future so those are definitely common themes within my reading this year outside of the things that i already naturally pick up as far as common cover elements 38 of the books that i read this year have faces on the cover 15 have the night sky on the cover 15 have flowers on the cover 10 have animals i think i read eight books that have like an underwater vibe and then 10 books with disembodied hands because all of these elements are things that i gravitate towards and covers and then quickly let's go through the colors of the covers just because they're all so beautiful i want to feature them so here's red and orangey ones and yellow ones and browns and golds and greens blues in between blue and green black and white covers and then covers that have way too many colors to fit into any one category every year i seem to read more and more pink and purple covers i'm definitely reaching for those and then the most common words you'll find in the books that i read besides the is you and me and we i don't know why that's interesting but it is to me and that's it those are all the stats that i find interesting about my 2020 reading let me know if in the future there's anything else you'd like to know about and anything that you found interesting anyways that um your bookshelves or your reading relates is there anything that is totally different in your reading life i would love to know your thoughts down below and i'll be chatting with you in the comments bye

Channel: BooksandLala

Views: 90,733

Rating: 4.9754748 out of 5

Keywords: books, booktube, bookish, booksandlala, reading year, what I read this year, books read 2020, 2020 reading stats, reading stats, what I read, 2020 books

Id: FPzFnz-oW70

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021