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, 2018 and 2019 posts, and it has been revealing interesting things about my reading habits. So why stop? 😉 Let’s talk nerdy and see what my numbers were like for the first six months of this year, shall we?

First of all some quick facts. In the first six months of 2020 I read no less than 135! books with a total page count of 45.333 pages; an average of about 336 pages per book. This is way more than I expected and if I keep this up I will end up reading even more than my previous record in 2019… Although I don’t think I can actually keep up this pace. The average rating is 3,76 stars, which is higher than in 2019 and I’m definitely happy about that. No less than 41 books had a 4,5 or 5 star rating and 34 books received a rating 3 stars or below… Which means I enjoyed reading about 74,8% of the books during the year, again higher than in 2019. Not that bad at all! Another fun fact: 59 of the 135 books I’ve read so far were actually ARCs; about 43,7% of the total. This means I’m close to keeping my promise to get the ARC ratio below 40%, so I’m quite 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 66% of the books I read had a 4 star rating or above! About 10% received a 2,5 star rating or below, but overall I’m definitely happy with these numbers as they are considerably better than in 2019.

Oh boy, I’ve been seriously slacking with my YA and MG reads! I already knew I was reading even more Adult titles than usual, but I should really try to find more balance in the second half of 2020.

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 only managed to increase the percentage 1% compared to last year, but a minor victory is still a victory. 😉

I’ve been reading more backlist titles and known authors this year, so I’m happy to see that the percentages for both are still quite balanced out.

I’m happy to see that I’m still reading translations! I even managed to increase the percentage slightly… I’ve read 13 translations so far, and a few more in a different language too (not shown as this graphic only shows translations).

I thought it was interesting to keep track of the author nationalities… The majority 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 in the first six months of 2020.

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 six months of 2020. Not bad at all! 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 feel 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, was represented though; I really have to step up my game in the second half of 2020!

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 an excellent 4,06 rating. Mystery/thriller/crime comes in a close second with a 4,02 rating... But both science fiction/dystopia and fiction/contemporary are really low with a 3,25 rating and 2,83 rating respectively. 

I’ve been able to balance out my stand-alones and series a bit better in 2020 so far, mostly because I’ve made a promise to myself to catch up and/or finish a bunch of series before the end of the year. I do love my stand-alones too, as this graphic shows.

This graphic makes me happy! I joined the Beat The Backlist challenge again to help me read older titles, and it seems to work… 36% of the books I picked up were published in 2017 or before, and a total of 60% of the books were published before 2020!  With the amount of ARCs I read this year, I’m over the moon to have these numbers to be honest.

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… A total of 18% of my books had over 400 pages; not too bad, but I hope to read more longer books in the rest of 2020.

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

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