Five Things I Learned From Reviewing My Reading Stats This Year

Your local numbers nerd quantifying her book adventures in graphs and averages, what else?

This year was the year I dove back into two long-time abandoned hobbies. Somehow, in just a span of a year, I’d written over 200 articles and poems, and read 21 books.

For some, 21 books might not be a lot but consider the context. I’d probably embarrassingly read about 21 books in the past 10 years. As I trudged through high school and undergrad, my love for books died a slow death due to assigned readings. It took nothing short of a miracle to revive this habit.

One simple factor weighed into the success of both reprised habits: reward.

For writing, you — amazing reader — are my reward. The fact that you’re taking the time to read, highlight, respond, tweet and overall interact with my writing is that source of dopamine reinforcing this writing habit.

You, dear reader, are part of the community that encourage a lot of budding writers to open up their heart and share those ideas with the world. Merci mille fois (thank you, a thousand times) for that.

On the other hand, it took me a bit longer to build the same kind of “community” in reading. First, I found Goodreads, which is helping me catalogue completed books in the most gorgeous of visualizations. My favourite graph they provide is a scatterplot that shows books read each year plotted against the year it was published.

A few things to notice:

• All of the books read in 2011 were assigned readings for English class.
• Between 2011 and 2020 almost nothing happened.
• That one book I read in 2000 (read: I was 6 years old) is The Giving Tree, a children’s book written in 1960. I’m not sure why I’m logging children’s books, but I imagine it’s because one day I want to have my own home library and I want to make sure that my favourite children’s books are apart of it, even if I don’t have children.
• In 2020, you see a cluster of books read across time, logged moments after I finished it. I hope this cluster continues to be this dense because I really derived joy from reading.

What I Learned from Reviewing my Goodreads Reading Stats:

6879 pages read & 21 books read, average book: 327 pages read per book

These look like meaningless numbers, but if you asked me a year ago how many pages I might read per book or how many books I’d manage to read in a year, I would never imagine numbers this big. I’d estimate something around ~100 pages per book, and perhaps 6 books a year if I was ambitious.

Turns out, as with many things I’m realizing in adulthood, you never know how predictions truly play out until you experiment and document.

I learned through this process that I can read about one book a month, and up to two if I mix in an audiobook.

Most local libraries have an ebook and audiobook repository that you can yaw from the comfort of your own couch (yes, you don’t even have to wear pants to check out books now!)

This made up at least half of the books read, and my house is cleaner than ever. Pairing cleaning with an interesting book has been the best decision of my life.

Shortest Book Read

The shortest book I read was“Passion Demands a Vocabulary of Desire” by Bauke Kamstra — an indie writer I’ve followed on Twitter since the dawn of my Twitter existence.

Of my books shelved, this is the least popular book on Goodreads with only 9 other people shelving this book. I have only one reaction to that: y’all are missing out!

Support micropoets in their poetry, it’ll definitely spark joy in your life.

Longest Book Read

The longest book I read was “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown. It was also the most popular book shelved, with 3449358 people wanting to read it. It’s wild because despite being the most popularly wanted book, it was the least favourite book I read all year.

In fact, it kickstarted my new rule that I now only finish books that I enjoy, and that I do not force myself to finish books I do not enjoy.

My rule of thumb now is that if it’s not good by the third chapter (or about 30% through), I’m no longer interested.

And this rule was entirely because the more I read from Angels and Demons, the more I was disappointed, until the peak finale of the ending, which was the peak disappointment of all of the things that happened throughout.

My Average Rating for 2020: 4.3 stars

Given this new rule, it makes sense that my average rating for 2020 was quite high — 4.3 stars! (Send me your books because apparently, I’m a really kind book reviewer?)

The truth is that when you no longer force yourself to waste time on books you don’t like, you really save time on reading things you enjoy.

This is the most tangible outcome of my goal of living in accordance with my values this year. The stats will show that for the books you did finish, you truly and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Highest Rated on Goodreads that I read

Of all the books I read, the highest rated book on Goodreads was The Skin We’re In my Desmond Cole, who writes from a Canadian perspective on anti-racism advocacy.

Reading this book, I reflected on how so much of the Canadian narrative is placed on “being kind” and “being better than the States” that it’s embarrassing — we have the same racist structures that perpetuate harm on BIPOC.

Though BIPOC myself, being neither Black nor Indigenous and also not realizing or even hearing about a lot of these stories as they happened is privilege in itself. There is much to learn and much to change, and this is the tip of the iceberg.

Final thoughts

There’s a suggestion that to find out what you really truly enjoy doing, you should think about what you spent most of your time on when you were 8… or 10. For me, that was reading. It was a huge pity (or as my friend likes to say — that’s a big dommage) that between 10 and 26 was a decade and a half of not spending time doing what I truly loved.

Getting back to it by linking it with another joy — graphs, numbers, and community — was a worthwhile endeavour though! Tell me: what things did you enjoy to do when you were 10? Are you still doing them?

How might you align them with other things that you like to do to kickstart this new habit?

Lucy (The Eggcademic) [she/her] is excited about what the next year has to bring. She’s currently tracking her reading list here, so if you have any recommendations, please send them her way!

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