Year in Review: An Introduction
It’s time for another year in review post! I’m still behind on all things reading, blogging, and podcasting, but I managed to switch my tracking spreadsheet over from Google Sheets to Excel. No more helper columns and finding questionable fixes that work for now and cause headaches later. Now I’ve got the much easier multi-sheet data model with rows of pivot charts…
With this being my second Year in Review post, I can officially call it an annual tradition. Yay! You can find 2021’s post here. My goal continues to be analyzing what I’ve read and holding myself accountable to pushing against my internalized biases in selecting what I read.
Book Stats
Once again, I’m breaking down these stats by both number of books read and by pages read. I feel the pages metric is useful, since my list includes short novellas and 1000+ page tomes.
I read a total of 44 books in 2021, adding up to 23,601 pages. That’s 43% fewer books read and 34% fewer pages. In 2021 my average book length was 470 pages and that jumped up to 549 pages in 2022. I guess I like some chonkers.
I always enjoy seeing my breakdown of books and pages read per month. You can get a quick feel for my reading time over the year and spot fun outliers (like in November, when I finished a 1000-page epic fantasy and a 64-hour audio drama).
I absolutely lean toward reading more recently-published books. Once again the current year (2022) was the clear leader, with 2019-2021 all following close behind. Pretty much everything before 2016 is due to reading Michelle West’s Essalieyan series (which you should really fucking read).
Also look at how long those 2022 books were! They average in at around 750 pages per book published in 2022. That’s almost certainly due to several Wandering Inn audiobooks releasing last year, with each one being upwards of 1200 pages in print.
My reading is very much dominated by fantasy. Pretty much every other genre is woefully underrepresented, though Horror got a big boost from the long Hello from the Hallowoods audio drama. The Sports category in entirely C.S. Pacat’s Fence series of graphic novels, which are all relatively short. I did read 3 romances and 4 nonfiction books, which is absolutely incredible for me! All of them are fairly short, though.
The podcast/audiodrama numbers here are underrepresented since I haven’t figured out a great way to track “page numbers” for those. Generally I am assigning page numbers comparable to books of similar audio length or finding an approximate average word count for each episode transcript and scaling up.
The main takeaway here was most of my reading is still in audio. Frantically cramming in as many chores as possible after your little goes to sleep is a great time to audiobook.
Parenting and work are both new categories here. The reading done for purposes of reviewing on the Inn was dismal (hello lack of free time). And yet, my “for fun” reading is some of the best it has ever been.
A third of my reading was for podcast interview preparation. Some was for actual interviews I did last year (not as many as I’d like, but still), and the rest is for my long-term interview goals. Still hoping to get Michelle West, Maggie Stiefvater, and others on the podcast at some point.
I didn’t read a single book published by Orbit last year, which has to be a first for me since I started reading SFF. I’ll have to make up for that in 2023.
You can see DAW (Essalieyan), Podium Audio (Wandering Inn), and self-publishing absolutely dominated my reading. Self published was John Bierce’s delightful Mage Errant series, Sarah Lin’s Street Cultivation (which may be my favorite progression fantasy ever), and Hello from the Hallowoods.
A Look at Authors
It’s been years since I first looked at my reading habits and realized almost every book was written by white men from the US or UK. I hadn’t consciously made that choice, and I resent that choice being made passively for me, regardless of what factors contributed to it. I can do better, and tracking author stats is one way I can ensure that.
Note that some demographic information is not readily/publicly available, so I either excluded those data points or took my best guess. I did put in genuine effort to get everything correct (without doing deep dives into someone’s identity), but there may be some errors. I’m okay with that since I’m only tracking general trends for my personal use and am not posting the raw data.
My reading has remained roughly 20% men, which is remarkably similar to last year given that I haven’t been tracking author gender until I panic-compiled my spreadsheet over the last couple weeks. There’s a good bit of difference between the books and pages charts, mainly due to how long The Wandering Inn volumes are and how short the Fence graphic novels are.
My reading is still mostly US/UK/Canada. Still a lot of work to do there if I want to read more diversely. Which is unfortunately exactly the same as last year.
This is both encouraging and still not good enough. I read a lot of books by white authors, though not as many as in past years. Maybe in a few years I’ll do a “trends over time” analysis post about my reading. For now, I’m pretty happy with this Year in Review.
Closing Thoughts
Overall I’m pretty happy with my reading progress in 2022. I wish I could’ve read more, but I wouldn’t have carved that time away from family. I’m sort of still sticking with my spreadsheet from last year, but this time it’s way slicker and easier to mainta
