Year end review #4: The Stats

I’ve been number-crunching on my master spreadsheet and yes, It’s time to share my year’s stats with you!  These are accurate to book 139 or 140 on my 2016 reading list on the tab above.

2016-blog-stats-books-and-pages

The amount I’m reading has been gradually going up year on year, as I watch less telly, do less sewing and go to bed to read earlier!  This year I topped the 40000 page mark and read 141 books for the first time (although the keen-eyed amongst you will notice that I made this graph after book 139).

2016-blog-stats-nationality

I read just slightly more UK and slightly fewer US ones this year, however I managed 27 novels in translation, 16 of which were originally published in French (incl French-Canadian and Belgian novels). Sadly I didn’t read any novels by African authors this year and correspondingly fewer from Asia too. Something to remedy in 2017 perhaps – although I can’t see my love affair with French novels changing soon.

2016-blog-stats-year-pub

After managing to throttle back on newly published books last year, this year I pushed the pedal down again and read 78/140 published this year and four not yet published.  I blame this fully on Shiny New Books! – that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.  My quota of ‘Pre-1960’ books was correspondingly down – 1960 being the year I was born, a good point at which to split things..

2016-blog-stats-genre

I aim to read widely across categories and genres and that continued this year, although I read more contemporary fiction and fewer crime novels and thrillers in 2016. Thanks to a concerted effort this month, my non-fiction tally is up with 18 books read maintaining the 13% achieved last year and I am finding these days that reading non-fiction provides some great intellectual stimulation in a different way to reading fiction.

2016-blog-stats-gender

I still maintain that I don’t deliberately pick male authors over female ones, and as you can see from the graph above, my reading has zigzagged over the years between approaching parity and being very male-biased. This year, thanks to reading four books by Beryl Bainbridge, I nearly reached the 50-50 mark – just missing it by 1%.

2016-blog-stats-new-to-me

My last stat shows how addicted I have been to discovering new authors over the past few years. I would like (and ought really) to delve deeper into books by authors I’ve already discovered – especially given the epic size of my TBR.


That’s my reading year in stats.
Time to set up a new spreadsheet page for 2017.
Do you keep reading stats?
Are there any stats you’d like me to add for next year?

Tomorrow – Looking forward to 2017.

2 thoughts on “Year end review #4: The Stats

  1. Cleo @ Cleopatra Loves Books says:

    I love book stats and obsessively keep track over the year – especially on those pages read which Goodreads kindly tracks for me! Having only ‘discovered’ Beryl Bainbridge this year I managed an impressive three books by her!

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