Tuesday, December 1, 2015

#AMonthofFaves : My Reading Year


Wow, can it be December again already?  This year has flown past at a glacial speed.  (This sort of comment may make better sense to those with broken ankles.  Days go by so slowly, yet it still seems as if three months of my life have vanished with astonishing speed.)  Anyhow, no ankle sob stories today.  I was excited to see that Estella's Revenge, girlxoxo.com, and Traveling with T have brought back their December blogging event - A Month of Favorites.  They've got blogging prompts for most of the weekdays of December to help us keep up our blogging mojo even through this busiest of months.  If you'd like to join the fun, just click over to the one of the hosts' blogs to find out the schedule.

To kick things off, we're doing a little "my reading year" overview.  My reading year was...good.  One more book read and I will have surpassed my number of books read at the end of the year last year.  Astonishingly however, I tallied up my number of pages read this year and last year, and I kid you not, I am within 50 pages of my number of pages read last year at this time.  I might be a slow reader, but it seems I am consistently slow.  Ha!

Also, strikingly similar to last year is my ratio of books authored by females to books authored by males.  The girls have it, making up around 75% of my reading.  I did a good job of balancing review copies with titles from my stacks.  An even half of my reading was not furnished by a publisher for my review consideration.  This was something that I meant to be better about, so it's exciting to have not lost track of that goal over the year.

May was tops for both quantity and quality of books read.  Thank you busted back and beautiful weather.  August was the worst.  Thank you workaholism and ankle surgery.  Ugh.  Thankfully, what the ankle stole in August, it returned in September and October when there was a major uptick in reading.  Obviously.  Those who cannot walk, read.  That's how that saying goes, right?

Thanks to a mid-summer move into a new apartment, I purged around 400 books from my collection, and I also haven't read a single e-book since most of the summer my goal was to unload books that would need to be lifted. I feel a little guilty about leaving my Kindle in the corner (nobody puts Kindle in a corner!), but hopefully I can make a return to occasional e-book reading in 2016.  I certainly haven't taken a break from e-book buying.

On the whole, 2015 was a much better quality reading year than 2014.  There were a random few duds that if I could go back in time I would totally DNF.  That said, looking back over the past few months, while I haven't read anything that's totally knocked my socks off, the books I've been reading have been consistently good.  Here's hoping the trend continues (except maybe a, uh, "sock knocker" is in order before the calendar turns another page) for the rest of the year!

What has been the highlight of your reading year?

9 comments:

  1. Congratulations on a great year of reading! I can't believe it's December already either. I read far more books by women this year too.

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  2. I haven't evaluated my reading year yet but I know I've read less this year than in year's past.

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  3. My Kindle is ALWAYS in the corner. I use it for Netgalley and that's it. I like having it for travel or as a backup but otherwise I just don't use it.

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  4. HA! I love your comment about ebook buying; there are just SOOO many good options and deals, aren't there? It's way to easy to push that button; I can relate! I can't believe it's December, either...so crazy.

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  5. Wow on getting rid of 400 books...I give them away a little bit at a time so I am sure I gave away a large number.

    I read more female authors than male also.

    I read more this year than last year, and my books have been very good. I am "picky." :)

    ENJOY the rest of your week.

    Elizabeth
    Silver’s Reviews
    My A Month of Faves

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  6. I culled a bunch of books this year too, but I don't think it was that many. Wow! It's freeing to get rid of the ones I know I'm never going to read. Room for new ones!

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  7. Wow on getting rid of that many books! Yay for you! And I'm dying LOL-ing over her with your Dirty Dancing reference to the Kindle. LOVE it. :)

    Thanks for joining in today with #AMonthOfFaves!

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  8. Listening to audiobooks has my total books read up from last year, but number of physical books is probably down.
    I'm with you on the female authors! woo hoo!
    That's hilarious how your page numbers read is almost identical - I guess you read at a certain pace.

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  9. Good job on the statistics! I can never keep track of my reading like that, although each year I start out all gung-ho with a list or a spreadsheet!

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