A 2021 Wrap Up // Stats, Thoughts, and New Year Goals

I know it’s now a week into 2022, but I always love reading everyone’s yearly wrap up posts so I figured I’d join in! Today I’m showing you all some fan graphs based on my reading year, all 61 of my favourite books of the year, celebrating some of the amazing bloggers I loved reading posts from in 2021, and some new years resolutions.

Contents

• Lets Have A Look At Some Bookish Stats!
  • Reading Stats In A Nutshell
  • It’s Time For Graphs
    • Number of Reads by Months
    • Genre of Reads
    • Author Gender
    • Author Diversity
    • Age Category
    • Year Released
    • Reading Format
    • ARC Vs Not an ARC
    • Standalone Vs Series
• My Favourite Books of 2021 (All 62 of them!)
• My Favourite Bloggers Of The Year
• Goals For The New Year

Let’s have a look at some bookish stats!

Reading Stats in a nutshell

Books Read: 205
Pages Read: 73,285
Average Rating: 3.75 Stars
Average Book Length: 357 Pages

It’s time for graphs

Number of Reads by Months

As you can see, I read pretty consistently throughout the year. It doesn’t look like I had any particular months I was slumping or reading loads more than usual. My lowest reading month was October, which makes sense because that time of year is super busy for me. My reads per month ranged from 14-19, which I’m really happy with!

Genre of Reads

This graph surprised me a bit. I know I’m a huge fantasy reader, but I wasn’t expecting nearly half of the books I read this year to be fantasy. I also thought a higher proportion of books would be sci-fi and horror! You can’t see it but there’s one tiny slither of non-fiction in there, hopefully, that’ll be a bit higher this year! Even though I obviously have my favourite genres I’m still happy to have picked up quite a few different genres in 2021.

Author Gender

This graph is almost what I expected. I know I read mostly women authors, but I was surprised by how large a proportion of non-binary authors I read in 2021! I’m using non-binary here as an umbrella term, just for ease of stats, but it features a lot of authors with a wide variety of gender identities. I’m not particularly surprised that only 10% of books I read this year were by men though.

Author Diversity

This graph also surprised me because I thought everything would be higher. I’m happy with the amount of LGBT books, and I managed to read a lot more trans and disabled authors work than 2020. I thought there would be more BIPOC reads so that’s something I want to work on in 2022. I’ve also included ‘other’ as a category rather than cishet/white/abled, as it’s likely some of those authors actually fit in somewhere else but either aren’t out or haven’t spoken about it publically.

Age Category

This one didn’t surprise me much. I’ve definitely moved on to preferring adult books over young adult in the last year. I imagine that trend might be even more strong in 2022, so I’m excited to compare those stats!

Year Released

This graph can be blamed 100% on me reading a large proportion of advance readers copies this year. I’m almost embarrassed to see how little I read that wasn’t released in 2021! I definitely want to focus more on backlist books in 2022.

Reading Format

I’m a big ebook reader so this doesn’t surprise me at all! I have a huge physical tbr to get through in 2022 so I imagine I’ll be reading more physical copies this year. I also thought audiobooks would be higher, but I’ve only recently started listening to them so it makes sense it’s a small percentage.

ARC Vs Not an ARC

I think I might have a problem. It’s so easy to fall into a trap of requesting loads and loads of advance copies, and I’ve loved it but I think it’s time to chill out!

Standalone Vs Series

This makes sense to me, especially considering series are made of multiple books. I love a good standalone, but as a fantasy reader series are the bread and butter of the genre.

My Favourite Books of 2021 (All 61 of them!)

Okay, so here’s a graphic of every book I tagged as my Best of 2021! I can’t believe there are 61 of them! Do you see any that you loved too? Any you hated? Let’s start some drama

My Favourite Blogs Of The Year

There have been so many amazing bloggers running amazing blogs in 2021! I’m definitely missing some, but here are some of the blogs I definitely recommend you check out!

• Snow White Hates Apples
• The Bookish Mutant
• Life Of Deekay
• Monogamist Reader
• The Geekish Brunette
• One Thousand and One Book
• The Fictional Journal
• Kira Jeanette
• The Alliterates
• Journey Into Books
• Reader Voracious
• Evelyn Reads
• dinipandareads
• Heavenly Bookish
• A Bolt Out Of The Book
• Literary Delirium
• Dipped In Ink
• Stories With Saima
• The Character Study
• A Book and Chai
• itsKoo Reviews
• Booksophobia
• Inking & Thinking

And there are so many more I’m missing off! If I didn’t feature your blog don’t think I didn’t love yours this year, everyone did such an amazing job.

Goals For The New Year

I don’t want to set too many goals for 2022, but here are a few I’ve been thinking about.

• I set my reading goal at 120 this year. It’s much lower than the amount I read in 2021, but I don’t want to pressure myself if things get busy.
• I actually want to post less on my blog this year. I know that sounds counterproductive but I’ve spent the last year and a half posting 3-4 times a week and I’m starting to feel a bit burnt out. I don’t want to take a hiatus, but I’m trying to figure out what kind of schedule will give me more free time. Especially with how I’ve been putting more effort into my other bookish media recently.
• I want to continue growing my platforms if I can! I have this blog, a twitter, instagram, and I recently started a tiktok. I don’t want to take this goal too seriously – I’ve decided this year is about having fun, but I’d love to get to reach out to more people.
• I want to get less arcs this year, and read more books that I’ve chosen to read, instead of because I have to. I feel like I’ve been slipping too much into reading as an obligation rather than because I love it, and I want to fix that this year.
• I want to keep reading diversely, and with more of a focus on reading books by authors of colour because I want that graph to higher next year!
• I want to focus on reading more backlist books since I want on a bit of a 2021 frenzy.
• I want to keep banching out and reading outside of my comfort zone, genre wise.
• I’d also like to catch up on some series this year, since I have a bad habit of starting but never finishing them!