2018 Reading Statistics and 2019 Goals

Happy New Year guys! 2018 is finally over and 2019 is here. 2018 has been a great year for me personally as things improved on the career front and I got to make some international trips – UK and Mexico. Life was hectic but eventful. I even got to attend Worldcon this year. Here’s hoping that 2019 will be equally good.

Link to my 2017 reading statistics and 2018 goals.

Coming to reading statistics from Goodreads –

I read 91 books this year with average length of 257 pages, which isn’t too bad. That comes to an average of 64 pages daily. I am happy with my reading this year as I got to read many great books which ended up on my favorites list. This was a year which was solely dedicated to Scifi and fantasy.

Now the genre breakdown looks like this –

Comics again were a major part of my 2018 reads, mostly because I was busy with other things like job interviews and did not find enough time to read a proper book. That reduced in the second half of 2018 after I had changed my job. I improved a lot wrt Non fiction this year as a major chunk of my reading was nonfiction. I hardly read anything other these and SFF books this year. Hardly any classics or YA.

Now on to the ratings I gave for the books on Goodreads:

I ended up DNFing a lot of books which would have gotten 1 star. That’s the reason why I have zero 1-star reads this year. Yay! That just means that I did not waste time reading books that I would have anyway ended up hating. I ended up with four 2-star reads. Rest of them were all 3,4 and 5 stars. Some of the books listed as 5 stars actually got 4.5 stars but Goodreads doesn’t have the decimal rating system, hence they got bumped to 5 stars.

Looking back at my 2018 goals –

1. Buy less books and use library often. -I consider this a success partially as I did not buy comic books this year and only got them from library. I did use the library.

2. Read less comics/graphic novels. – I read less than last year but still quite a lot of them. Carrying this goal to next year.

3. Read only books that you find interesting and not because they are popular. – Yes! I did that. Carrying this goal to next year as well.

4. Discover books that are not very well known/read in the reading community. – Not much success in this regard. But I did find some nonfiction gems this year.

5. Reduce my physical TBR of books which is too high. – No success with that. The TBR is still too high. I am planning to go on a book buying ban this year.

6. Take your time, enjoy reading instead of making it a chore. – I started doing this only towards the end of the year. 2019 is going to be a more relaxed year in terms of reading.

7. Keep unhauling books that don’t get 4 or 5 stars. – Yes, I have been doing this.

8. Reread more of your favorite books. – Total failure. Need to do this at least in 2019.

Along with these goals from last year, this year’s goal is –
9.

To read huge fantasy books. They are intimidating and take lot of time but I want to read them. My Goodreads goal is going to be less this year so that I can focus on big books, instead of smaller ones which I end up reading just to meet the goal.

How was your reading in 2018? What are your goals for 2019?