Hello!

I may have missed the Q1 stats boat, but I’m ready and waiting for the mid year check in!

I love stats and graphs and data, so Storygraph is my favourite thing ever – I’m sorry, I don’t understand why anyone still uses Goodreads 😂

Let’s dive straight into the fun bit!

So far this year I’ve read 30 books, which was 9,178 pages and over 208 hours of audiobooks! Some of them I read just as physical books, some just as audiobooks, some I co-read, some were new releases and some are from my backlist. By goal for the year is 52 books and I’m currently over halfway and several books ahead of schedule! I’m not doing as well as I did this time last year – my reading goal last year was 42 books and I hit that goal by the end of June, but I went on my two week honeymoon where I did nothing but read so that definitely helped. I have read something every single day this year and I’m happy with that!

My most read moods are emotional, adventurous and lighthearted – I think adventurous comes from trying to read a whole box set of the Famous Five books this year, but emotional and lighthearted absolutely line up with my love for an easy cheesy contemporary romance.

I think pace is so subjective and again this is from Storygraph data and not my reviews – I don’t think it’s a surprise that I’ve predominantly medium paced books because I feel like they’re pretty standard? And I wouldn’t even agree that all of the books that have been listed here are necessarily slow paced.

Most of the books under 300 pages that I’ve read this year are the Famous Five box set I’ve been working on and the long books are anomalies – I’ve been trying my best to actually make achievable tbr’s and that’s meant picking shorter books, so I’m aiming for the 300-350 page mark, even though many of them have snuck into the 400 page marker.

I’ve never really got the fuss of tracking pages, but using another spreadsheet which tracks pages each month, there are some months where I read more pages even though I’ve finished less books. This spreadsheet also tracks the number of words I’ve read, but the website that estimates word count doesn’t have every book I’ve read this year so it’s not particularly accurate.

Audiobook length is much of the same – this doesn’t tell us much and it actually tells even less because I can’t include the audiobooks for books I co-read so I have actually listened to more audio than Storygraph thinks I have. My spreadsheet tells me I’ve listened to approximately 160 hours more audiobooks than I’ve been able to track!

Ironically, I’ve just finished my first non-fiction book of the year, but the first half of this year was all fiction! I’ve got a few more non-fiction books I’d like to read this year, particularly Strong Female Character by Fern Brady and But Everyone Feels This Way by Paige Layle, but we’ll see if I actually get round to it.

Romance, fantasy and contemporary are my top genres of the year so far? Wow, I’m so surprised (she said sarcastically). Mystery and childrens are only so high because of the Famous Five, but I have read more literary books than I expected so far this year and I’ve enjoyed them more than I thought! It’s actually been relatively varied this year and I’m pleased with it all.

This is the kind of pie chart that I love – I like that I read from different sources, but I’m also glad that I’m predominantly reading print books because that means I’m working on my physical tbr. Again, the data isn’t entirely accurate because I can’t track co-reading without Storygraph thinking I’ve read a book twice, but hopefully this is a feature they’ll implement someday!

I really am loving reading on my Kindle at the moment and when I get further through my tbr I fully intend to read more on my Kindle, but that’s going to several years (decades) down the line I think!

I don’t want to keep ‘justifying’ why the Famous Five books are altering my stats so much, but I do feel the need to clarify that it’s not because I’m an Enid Blyton super fan or anything – it’s just a reading challenge that is skewing my stats a little bit! Scarlett St Clair is because I finished reading the Hades x Persephone series earlier this year, then some of Ella Maise’s books are included in the Audible Plus catelogue and it makes them feel like free audiobooks and I am an Ali Hazelwood super fan – I read her new releases as soon as they came out. Maybe I’ll reread her other books to push her higher up the rankings!

Honestly, considering how poor my ratings were for the books I read in January, I’m genuinely stoked that my average rating is so close to 3.5! Would I love it to be closer to 4? Absolutely, but we take what we can get and it’s still over 3 so I’ll take it.

Then I thought this data from one of my spreadsheets was a nice summary – I’m really pleased with a 6:2 ratio on my 5 and 1 star reads (gutted that I had two 1 star reads in January 👀). I love this little summary and I used most of this data in my reading journal too!

I’m really pleased with my reading so far this year! It’s not as much as last year, but I’m in a very different headspace than I was in last year and I feel like I’m growing a lot as a person, so I’m not gutted with not having read as much as I had this time last year.

Last year I went on my two week honeymoon to Greece where I did basically nothing but read, so if anyone wants to send me to the mediterranean for another summer holiday I will definitely read more!

Thank you so much for reading,

Sophie xx