My 2014 Bookish Stats

I've always loved those bookish stats posts where bloggers look over their year in reading and breakdown their books read by rating, genre, etc. I'm always curious! So I've put together a few pie charts depicting My 2014 Bookish Stats. Don't know if anyone will even be interested in this except me, so feel free to skip this post!

Total Books Read in 2014: 125

Note: To make this easier, I've rounded UP all .5 Star Ratings. So 4.5 Stars is lumped in with 5 Stars, 3.5 Stars is lumped in with 4 Stars, etc.

2014 Breakdown by Rating: This stat pleases me: I read an equal amount of 4.5-5 Star reads and 3.5-4 Star reads in 2014 and together, these reads made up the majority of my reading for last year. A pretty solid year in books, I would say! It helps that over the years, I've gotten better at picking books I think I will like. These days, it's pretty rare that I read a book that I don't enjoy at ALL.

2014 Breakdown by Genre: No surprise here: fantasy makes up the biggest pie slice in a breakdown of reading genres in 2014. Of course, there are many sub-genres within Fantasy that I could break down some more: high fantasy, paranormal, mythology, etc. - I love it all! I'm impressed with myself that fairly sizeable portions of the pie go to Contemporary and Classical Fiction.

2014 Breakdown by Type: Here lies the reason I was able to fit in 125 books in my schedule in 2014: I very much got into audiobooks this year! I didn't always have a ton of free time in 2014 with which to read, but I DID have regular life obligations like cleaning, cooking, getting ready in the morning/bedtime, working out, etc., and those turned into the bulk of my reading time, via audiobook. 2015 is shipping up to be much the same! Audiobooks are a great way to reread favourites and act as plot-reminders pre-sequels and book-to-movie adaptations.

2014 Breakdown by Source: Those audiobooks I mentioned in the previous stat? Well, a lot of them were the freebies that SYNC Audiobooks gives out every summer. I also took advantage of Free Books of the Week deals on various websites. I'm quite proud that the majority of books I read in 2014 were either free or borrowed! If I had put together these stats in my first year of blogging, I guarantee you that Review Books and Purchased Books would make up the majority of the pie. Notably, I read only 8 review books from publishers in 2014... and I'm quite happy with that. Honestly, I've largely fallen out of love with reading early galleys from publishers. Most of the time these days, I'd rather wait to read reviews first before deciding whether the book will work for me. Generally makes for a happier reading experience for me! And indeed, the 8 reviews books that I did read in 2014 were some of my lower-rated reads.

2014 Breakdown by Author Gender and Protagonist Gender: Pretty pleased with these stats! Female to male proportions are almost equal in both a breakdown of author genders and a breakdown of protagonist genders for 2014. BUT you'll notice I have no graphs depicting the POC and LGBT representations of books I read in 2014 - basically because it's not good. It doesn't help that POC and LGBT characters don't tend to be the protagonists in the non-contemporary reads I favour. I'm already working on fixing this in 2015.

2014 Series vs. Standalone: Wow, it's surprising to see this stat laid out like this! I mean, of course I knew that I tend to favour series over standalones, but I didn't think the ratio would be 3:1. Ultimately though, I'm not one of those readers who is wanting more standalones and less series in their life... But I DO want to keep a tab on the series I do read and work on getting my overall numbers of series on-the-go down. I'm thinking I need to make a worksheet of all the series I have read/am in the middle of/want to read in the future to keep track of all of them. DROWNING IN SERIES!

So there you go! I wish I had done this in previous years so that I could compare stats from year-to-year. I guess I'll just have to remember to do them from 2015 on!