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upside-down-uni · 2 years

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end of year reading tag!

I really don’t know where she takes the energy but our beloved Sab (@bulletnotestudies) made her own end of the year tag game! Thank you to @jeonchemstudy for also tagging me, I am beyong overjoyed that you enjoyed all the recs I’ve given you! Nothing hits quite the same as your taste in books being complimented.

Here comes my end of the year run down of my reading:

1. did you meet your reading goal?

I did! My goal was 40 books and I even surpassed it! Right now I’m working on book number 55.

2. top 3 books you read this year

....instead of ranking my top three I’ll just yeet some of my 5 star reads out there because how dare you make me choose Sab!! evil!

I reread Gideon the Ninth, so that is obviously on the list. If you haven’t read it I’m literally begging you to! There’s also The BrickTM aka The Priory of the Orange Tree, which I read after @hannistudies recommended it to me. A BLAST, I need more of this kind of books!! Irown Widow completely blew my socks off, I need the sequel NOW. (Oh and there’s this series “All for the Game”, which Sab and @asteristudy are completely normal about, so I read it too, and I am also very normal about it.)

3. what’s a book you didn’t expect to enjoy as much as you did

Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi or Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. I was kind of scared of both but I thoroughly enjoyed them!

4. what books didn’t live up to your expectations?

What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo and Das Ministerum der Träume by Hengameh Yaghoobifarah. Both in different ways: What Big Teeth started out annoying me but in the end it kind of redeemed itself while Das Minisertium der Träume pulled me in from the first page but ruined itself through the ending.

5. did you reread any old faves?

I wouldn’t say “fave” but I reread book one and two of the Clockwork Series by Kady Cross. They hold up surprisingly well and I still enjoyed them!

6. did you dnf anything

Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart just didn’t do it for me, I got about 100 pages in and was still bored.

7. did you read anything outside your preferred genre

I read The Southern Bookclub’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix which was my first “true” horror book. (thank you to @tungumalaast) I think gtn worked as a gateway drug lmao

8. what was your predominant format this year?

I read mostly physical books this year although most of the books I’ve read after October have been digital.

9. the longest book i read this year

I was going to say The BrickTM but then I checked my storygraph and The Nightblade Epic: Volume 1 by Garrett Robinson (which includes the first three books in the series) beats Priory of the Orange Tree by 2 pages.

10. your 3 most anticipated 2022 releases

NONA THE NINTH! Right now it’s 258 days until release, I will DIE before that! And the second book in the Iron Widow series is set to release in 2022 but I don’t know when!

Apart from that I haven’t really kept up with anything...I’ll let myself be surprised by what the knife gang will show up with and yell about on discord!

11. what books on your tbr did you not get to this year, but are excited to read in 2022?

Oh for sure! *storygraph checking noises*

I really wanted to read No Gods No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull but didn’t get around to it after it came out earlier this year. Hunger Pangs by Joy Demorra is also very high on my list as is the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has been chilling on my tbr for about 2 years now too... I will have a lot more time to read next year though.

I don’t really know who to tag outside of knife gang, so if you follow me, and fwant to do the tag: consider yourself tagged! I love seeing what and how others read!

#end of year reading tag #mo talks #knife gang #tagged

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accidentalspaceexplorer · 3 years

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It is finally the end of 2020, so it’s time to look at my reading stats for the year!

Overall, I’m happy with how much I read this year, since I exceeded my goal of 100 by a good margin, but I didn’t actually like what I read this year as much. Including my ratings for the books I DNF’d this year, my average rating was 3.82/5, which is much lower than last year’s total (4.13/5). Overall, I think this happened for a couple of reasons: the pandemic meant that I wasn’t checking things out from the library for like three months so I wasn’t getting as many things I was excited about, I was more focused on my goals this year (more on that later), and I read more things outside of my comfort zone. I did read some really awesome stuff though, and I’ll have my favorites for this year up soon, but I also read a lot of stuff I didn’t like as much.

Other stats:

I DNF’d 15 books this year

I re-read 14 books this year

74% of the books I read were by female authors

I read 6 books by nonbinary and genderqueer authors

25% of the books I read were by authors of color

42% of the books I read had LGBTQIA+ representation in them

I read 9 nonfiction books

My top 3 genres were fantasy (49 books), romance (36 books), and science fiction (28 books)

It is now time for the aforementioned check-in with my goals! I have a separate post that I’ve previously used to track my goals here but I’m going to talk about the final results down below (spoiler alert I didn’t do them haha)

I definitely didn’t do very well on the goals I set for myself this year. Part of that is that each individual goal is reasonable but without doubling anything, I wanted myself to read at least 115 books to meet my goals. Given the number of books I read this year, it was doable, but it would have required me to be on top of my goals from the beginning of the year and read like no mood books, which is pretty unreasonable I think. Next year I will be setting up my goals very differently! (A separate post will be going up soon about that.)

On to the actual goals now!

finish the books that have been sitting on my Goodreads currently reading list for years - the only one left is Clariel, which is one I was re-reading as an audiobook with my husband, so since he hasn’t been in the mood for it it didn’t happen. Otherwise I was successful! I’m actually really pleased that I managed to finish the rest of them. (6/7, success)

get my physical TBR bookshelf down to one shelf of books - this one didn’t quite happen. My physical TBR is now primarily on one shelf, with the second shelf being devoted to my library TBR and a few of the physical TBR books I’d really like to get to soon. (fail)

read more romance novels - in 2019 I read 33 romance novels, and this year I read 36! By percentages it’s a failure because I read a lot more books this year, but by flat number it’s a success so I’m taking that one haha. (36/34, success)

read through the first twenty-two books on my Goodreads TBR (up through The Collapsing Empire) - I got so close on this one, but didn’t end up finishing The Collapsing Empire before the end of the year sigh. (21/22, fail)

review every book I read - I didn’t quite make it to this one, although I am planning to catch up soon. There are probably 7 books that I read for the first time this year that I haven’t writtten any kind of review for. Weirdly, almost all of them are books that I loved. (120/127, fail)

read Harrow the Ninth - success! I loved it too. (1/1, success)

read Network Effect - success! I also loved this one. (1/1, success)

read more fantasy and sci-fi romance novels - last year, I read 4 fantasy and sci-fi romance novels, and this year I read 8, so I win! (8/4, success)

read more books by non-binary authors - I read 5 books by nonbinary authors this year and one by a genderqueer author, which is much better than I have been doing. (6/3, success)

read at least 5 books in translation - I only read 3: Daughter of Fortune, Persepolis 2, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. (3/5, fail)

read 2 books in Spanish - I DNF’d Cien años de soledad, does that count? (.5/2, fail)

read The Laird of Duncairn - I just didn’t do this (0/1, fail)

read Zeus Grants Terrible Wishes - I also didn’t do this (0/1, fail)

find a book club I like - I started one with my friends, which was a great way to get around my problem of not liking the selections in the book clubs I was looking at. (1/1, success)

read 4 more Discworld books, up through Maskerade - I am currently listening to Maskerade, but we’re not done with it yet. (3.5/4, fail)

read 8 nonfiction books - I read 9, although I did DNF one. I did really enjoy some of the ones I read, although there were some definite misses as well. I read The Curve of Time, Because Internet, The Lost Kingdom of the Monkey God, Organizing Success, Wait Till Next Year, Storm in a Teacup, Knitting in the Old Way, Strangers in Their Own Land, and Persepolis 2. (8.5/8, success)

read 3 volumes of poetry - I only read 2 - Felicity and the princess will save herself in this one, neither of which I liked. (2/3, fail)

read Full Fathom Five - this book was really excellent! (1/1, success)

read another book by Guy Gavriel Kay - nope (0/1, fail)

catch-up on at least 3 series - I caught up on 5 and finished 4, although I did start 3 of those in 2020. I also started 15 series, so like...not ideal. However I technically did it haha (9/3, success)

Overall, that’s 10/20, which is not great. One of the things that I really noticed by the end of the year when I was really trying to catch up on the goals was that I had really made reading into a chore. I would catch myself thinking, “No I can’t read Take a Hint, Dani Brown, I have to read Daughter of Fortune next, because it’s on the list.” and that kind of thinking really saps the fun out of reading for me. So next year, I’m not setting concrete goals like read 3 ___ books or read more ____ books, although I am going to encourage myself to read certain categories of books. More on that in the goals post!

#personal #year in review

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