Call me a nerd, but I do love my graphics posts! I first started properly keeping track of my reads in Excel back in 2016, making it possible to finally put together some graphics. I’ve done a bunch of ‘The Numbers’ posts over time, including my 2016 and 2017 posts and a review of the first 6 months of 2018, and it has been revealing interesting things about my reading habits. So why stop? 😉 This post will be all about my reading year of 2018. Let’s talk nerdy and see what my numbers were like, shall we?

First of all some quick facts. In 2018 I have read no less than 245 books with a total page count of 77.215 pages; an average of about 316 pages per book. I somehow managed to read A LOT more in the second half of 2018 than the first six months! The average rating is 3,55 stars, which is lower than before and probably partly due to the fact I had three more 0 star ratings (DNF). No less than 59 books had a 4,5 or 5 star rating and 81 books received a rating 3 stars or below… Which means I enjoyed reading about 67% of the books during the year. Not that bad at all, even though the number is lower than previous years. Another fun fact: 124 of the 245 books I’ve read so far were actually ARCs; about 51% of the total. I managed to bring down that ratio considerably in the second half of 2018 and I’m hoping to maintain this balance in 2019!

And now some graphics for those who like them as much as I do. 😉

This graphic above explains exactly why my average rating ended up being quite high… About 51% of the books I read last year had a 4 star rating or above! About 17% received a 2,5 star rating or below, which explains why my average rating was lower at the end of the year. Still, I’m definitely happy with these numbers.

I already knew I hadn’t been reading a lot of Middle Grade in 2018, but I’m happy I was able to improve its number slighty. In it shows I still read more Adult than YA, although the amount of YA titles has stayed the same in the second half of 2018.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is read more books by male authors, because somehow I always seem to be reading more books my female authors (even though I never base my choice of books on the gender of the author). Sadly, I wasn’t able to make an improvement in the second half of 2018, and the numbers have stayed the same.

 This year I decided to start keeping track of whether the books I read are by new authors or authors already known to me. I managed to balance out the numbers in the second half of 2018 as I read both old favorites and new discoveries.

Another new graphic! I started keeping track of the translations I read compared to those I read in the original language… I normally prefer reading the original story, but with a lot of languages I don’t exactly have a choice. 😉 It’s interesting to see what a whopping 9% or 23 books were actually translations!

Another new graphic! I decided to start keeping track of the author nationalities this year and this graphic is the result! While the mayority of my reads were between UK and US authors, I’m happy to see quite a few other countries on here as well.

This is what the previous graphic looks like on a map! The countries in blue represent the nationalities of the authors I was able to read in 2018. Not bad at all.

And here is another map, this time around of the different settings I managed to travel to with the help of the books I read during 2018. There is a lot of red here, and a lot of countries I managed to read about (not including the high fantasy worlds of course).

The main genre is basically the most dominant genre I think each book belongs to. As always mystery/thriller/horror is the biggest group (there’s truly no surprise there for those who follow my blog!). What is a surprise is that I have picked up a significant amount of contemporary romance reads as well, since it’s not one of my favorites. It’s good to see both historical fiction, non fiction/memoir and fantasy quite well represented as well.

This average rating graphic is quite a shock… Although I’m aware each genre has received a few lower ratings during the year. Mystery/thriller/crime is well on top with a 3,85 rating. Looks like I’ve been reading a lot of excellent thrillers this year! Contemporary romance surprisingly came in second with a 3,58 rating, which I definitely didn’t see coming as it’s not my favorite genre. Fantasy comes in third (3,5 rating) with historical fiction close behind at 3,46 stars. I’m actually quite shocked by the lowish ratings of the genres in general, but I guess it’s due to a few DNF (0 rating) and other low reads I sadly had in 2018.

The series/stand-alone ratio hasn’t changed in the second half and I’m actually quite happy with this. As much as I love reading series, I tend to neglect them with the result of a huge pile of unfinished series collecting dust. And there is no such problem with stand-alones! 😉 I do want to finish a bunch of those unfinished series in 2019 though.

Boy do I feel bad about this graphic! I joined the Beat The Backlist challenge and have other challenges as well to help me read older titles, and although I did read more backlist titles in the second half of the year,only 24% of the books I’ve read in 2018 are published in 2015 or before. At least I can be happy to say that 52% of books were published before 2018 and I did seem to balance out those ARCs and backlist titles better.

Last graphic: as always most books I’ve read have between 300 and 399 pages, which seems to be a pretty good number and a  sign of a story that’s not too short and not too long. There are exceptions of course; some stories are just too complex to be told in under 400 pages… I do have to step up my game when it comes to reading longer books, because only a meager 13% of my books had over 400 pages.

Tired of numbers yet? I know I am! That’s it for this 2018 review… Happy reading everyone!

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