2019 in review

I know this is super late, but I wanted to get it out there, if only for myself. 2019 was not my best year in terms of reading. Although I bloomed into a lil sunflower, I had to put aside my reading challenge in order to do that at times. As such, I left my Goodreads challenge unfinished. I only completed 59 books out of my goal of 70. Still, the books I read in 2019 were high-quality, & I look forward to even better reads this year!

I'm going to divide the books I read into categories, including page number, genre, and format, and analyze from there.

page number

>300: 19

300-500: 33

500+: 7

As usual (last year being the exception), the majority of the books that I read fell between 300 & 500 pages long. According to my Goodreads 2019 Year in Books, the average length of books I read was 357 pages. The shortest book I read was The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, which was 100 pages (I think this is inaccurate though). The longest book I read was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling, which was 870 pages.

genre *

fiction: 39

- YA: 16

- fantasy: 9

- literary: 7

- contemporary: 5

- historical: 5

- other: 4

nonfiction: 16

- biography/memoir: 7

- Christian/spirituality/philosophy: 5

- other: 4

poetry: 3

- epic: 3

My reading was not as diverse in 2019 as I'd have liked it to be, but I still read across genres, including science fiction, political nonfiction, and epic poetry. The categories I dived into the most were YA fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, and biographies/memoirs. In 2020 (yes, I know we are already in May), I'd like to read even more diversely, picking from oft-forgotten categories such as mystery.

format *

- hardcover: 26

- paperback: 24

- audiobook: 14

I didn't read as many audiobooks in 2019 as I did in 2018, but I am still definitely getting good use out of my Audible membership. I hope this year I can continue to read across formats (excluding ebooks--yuck).

Overall, 2019 was a good year for reading, though not the best. I hope to change that in 2020, with a goal of 80 books for my Goodreads challenge!

xx Liz

What books did you read in 2019?

* numbers do not add up precisely because some books fit more than one genre &/or format