Oh hello! Happy new year! This feels absolutely astonishing to say, but 2022 was the best reading year I’ve had in probably a decade–and not only by the numbers…although those were exciting too! In 2022 I read 100 books–which is more than I’ve read any year since I first starting tracking my reading on G*odreads back in 2013. Which means that I read more this year than I have since my first year of middle school…which seems impossible considering all of the school work I had and all of the fan fiction I also read. I personal don’t track fanfics in my reading goals–though I know plenty of people who do. The number would be closer to 120-150 if we counted full length/novel length fanfics.
I also read some absolutely fantastic books in 2022. I have a new favorite book of all time! Some new go-to recommendations! Some new romance favorites as I’ve dived more intensely into the genre. First I’m going to walk through the stats and then share my best reads of 2022. *All stats are from The Storygraph.
Graph #1: This displays the ~moods~ of my books. I take this one with a grain of salt because I don’t always agree with The Storygraph’s mood tags, but overall I think me reading mostly emotional books really fits the bill of my #depressybessy 2022. (I was feeling much better by the end of the year though! Stay tuned for my fall semester reflection). I also don’t know if that ~page number~ number is completely accurate because I didn’t pay great attention to formats when tracking this year. I’ll do better in 2023.
Graph #2: Pace. This feels pretty on point to me, although I really struggle to evaluate the difference between medium/slow pace when I’m reviewing books. A fast paced book is a page-turner, but other than that I usually feel as though they’re the same? Idk about this one.
Graph #3: Fiction/Nonfic break down. I’m pretty proud of this one. I doubled my nonfiction intake in 2022 (in 2021 only 6% of the books I read were nonfiction).
Graph #4: Page Number Breakdown. This one always fascinates me because I have this internal assumption that I mostly read really short books but I’m just completely wrong about that. Middle range page length ftw!
Graph #5: Pages/Books over the year. This is by far my favorite graph. You can tell when I was on vacation (spring break and March, start of summer break in June, winter break in December) by this big jumps. You can tell when the semester started with the decreased number of books in September. It’s also just so cool to see it over time.
Graph #6: Genre Breakdown. This one always surprises me because I consider romance books my feel good books/palate cleanser (I don’t believe in guilty pleasure reading) but I think I needed to feel good more in 2022 than I thought lol. That would be the depression. Also I read way more fantasy in 2022 than I thought I did!
Graph #7: Author Breakdown. This is my second favorite graph I think–especially curious to see how this pans out in 2023 as I do more author studies. Butler took the win by a landslide with my thesis (I read her entire catalogue!) but its fun to see where I found new authors I love here (Rachel Lynn Solomon! Abby Jimenez).
five star reads of 2022
(in no particular order)
