Tuesday, December 22, 2015

My 2015 reading


Hello everybody. Tis the season to do wrap-up posts, and so here we are, or rather here I am, taking a look of what I read this year. Turns out, it was a pretty good reading year, IMO. I thought I was going to read way less than I did, with the final experiments and the article, but no. As we are speaking I have finished 102 books and I am currently reading 3, with 2 ready for the long flight coming my way. So I think I will be looking at about 107 books FINISHED this year. I did have 5 DNFs, highest I’ve ever had, but hey, if a books is not doing it for you, move on, am I right? I also read 29 comics this year, the reason why I am not counting them together is simply that this is the first year I had actually read comics, so to compare with previous years, I decided to keep them separately. Now, let’s take a look of those stats. (*note: these numbers are based on the books I have finished to date, but except for the rating average, most of the stats will pretty much remained unchanged until the end of the year).

Of the books I read, 81% of my reading was Fiction. I did however attain my goal of reading at least one non-fiction book per month, so I am happy with that. The biggest chunk of my fiction reading was in (unsurprisingly) Science Fiction or Fantasy (21%), followed by General Fiction and Historical Fiction. In the case of non-fiction, General NonFic (8%) was the top contender, followed by Memoirs.

Regarding sex representation, 68% of the books I read had female authors and 61% had female main characters, and almost 40% of the books passed the Mako Mori Test, so that was good. Only about 10% of the books had LGBTQ characters sadly.

Most of my reading remained in paper print (58%), but compared to previous years, my audio books were more present than e-print. As long as ownership goes, I am very happy because 60% of my reading came from books I already owned (not that I stopped buying books, but still), followed by 32% from the library.

Language wise, English is still my most read language (84%) due to availability of most of the books. However, I am very happy because my Spanish reading more than double (12% this year compared to 5% last year) and that means I also accomplished my goal of reading at least on book in Spanish every month (I read a total of 13). As far as POC representation goes, 30% of my reading had a POC author with a similar value of POC main characters. This also means that I attained my goal of reading at least one POC author per month (31 books to be exact).

Of my other challenges, I read almost every book from the Sword and Laser book club, except for 2, since 1 I had already read before and the other one I was unable to find at the library or Audible. Sure I could’ve bought it but…well, I didn’t. I also read every book from the Hello Hemlock book club, and did read a Canadian author every month. I also checked this year how many books I was reading per month, just to see if I had months where I read more than others. The answer is: not significantly. This year I couldn’t participate in the fall Read-a-Thon, but even then, my average remained between 8 and 9 books per month.

I am very happy with my reading experience, since most of the books I read had a 4 mushroom rating (46%) and I did have a 28% of 5 mushrooms, which basically means, those surpassed expectations. 

Finally, the last thing I checked was the countries being represented on my reading, either by origin of the author or setting of the story. Every represented country has been colored in this map…see the problem there? Only one country in whole Africa! I am satisfied with Latin America, but even then, I know I can do better. So I am setting my goals for 2016. I will write a post about soon enough, but needless to say, I am going for better representation.

How was your reading year?

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