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, 2017 and 2018 posts, and it has been revealing interesting things about my reading habits. So why stop? 😉 This post will be all about the first eight months of 2019 (I did a post about the first four months back in May). Let’s talk nerdy and see what my numbers were like, shall we?

First of all some quick facts. In the first eight months of 2019 I have read no less than 181 books with a total page count of 60.650 pages; an average of about 335 pages per book. This is way more than I expected and and if I keep it up I will actually break my 2018 record… The average rating is 3,62 stars, which is slightly higher than in 2018 so I guess not too bad. No less than 50 books had a 4,5 or 5 star rating and 55 books received a rating 3 stars or below… Which means I enjoyed reading about 69,6% of the books during the year. Not that bad at all! Another fun fact: 68 of the 181 books I’ve read so far were actually ARCs; about 37,6% of the total. This means I’m keeping my promise to get the ARC ratio below 40%, so I’m definitely happy with that!

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 56% of the books I read had a 4 star rating or above! About 14% received a 2,5 star rating or below, which explains why my average rating isn’t that high either. Still, I’m definitely happy with these numbers.

I already knew I haven’t been reading a lot of Middle Grade, but I really should try to get a few more titles in… And it shows I still read way more Adult than YA.

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). I admit it’s not that big of an improvement, but I did read more books by male authors in the last four months than in the first four months of 2019.

I’m surprised to see I’ve been discovering way more new authors than reading books by authors I’ve read before in the first eight months of 2019… Not a bad thing necessarily, as I love discovering new authors, but I enjoy going back to old favorites as well.

These numbers are not a surprise as 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 7% or 12 books were actually translations so far this year! And I have a few more lined up for the next months as wel… Gotta love Nordic Noir. ❤

I thought it was interesting to keep track of the author nationalities… The mayority of my reads were between UK and US authors (no surprise here), but 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 orange represent the nationalities of the authors I was able to read so far in 2019.

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 the first eight months of 2019. In case you are wondering how I’m able to create the maps; I’m using this page.

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!). I’m surprised how poorly one of my other favorite genres, historical fiction, is represented this year, and I really have to remedy that in the next few months.

A new graphic! I decided to start keeping track of the POV in each story… And a surprising amount of stories ended up having more than one POV where both genders are represented.

This average rating graphic is quite a shock… Although I’m aware a lot of genres have received lower ratings. It seems I have been lucky with my historical fiction reads and I was able to maintain a comfortable 3,85 rating. Mystery/thriller/crime comes in first again though after a few 5 star reads, and now has a 3,91 rating. Science fiction/dystopia and non fiction/memoir are again really low with a 2,88 rating and 2,94 rating respectively. I’m actually quite shocked by the lowish ratings of the genres in general, but I guess it’s due to five DNF (0 rating) and other low reads I sadly had in in the first eight months of 2019.

It turns out I’ve been reading even more stand-alones than last year! I’m not that surprised though… 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 have been working on finishing a bunch of those poor unfinished series though.

Finally an improvement! I joined the Beat The Backlist challenge again to help me read older titles, and it seems to work… 34% of the books I picked up were published in 2016 or before, and a total of 64% of the books were published before 2019! I seem to be able to finally 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’m happy to have read more longer books compared to 2018! A total of 19% of my books had over 400 pages.

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

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