In 2020 I read 43 books, which was a little short of my goal of 50, but still more than I read last year. The Goodreads app does some analysis of your reading list, but it’s never quite enough for me, so I always through the data into a spreadsheet to extrapolate those sweet sweet graphs (insert nerd emoji). If you want to do the same with your books, you can head down to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find a link to download the blank template for this. Books and data is such a great combo!

First, some raw data and hard facts…

• I read 43 books, which equals 17,252 pages in total.
• The longest book was Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb
• The shortest book was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The oldest book was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Now let’s look at the country of birth of the authors I read…

You can see I read mostly authors from the US and UK. I’d like to read from a wider range of authors with more diverse backgrounds and cultures.

Next is gender of the author…

As you can see, I mostly read female writers. Not really so mad about that.

The dates each book was published…

This graph shows the date of publication of the books I read in 2020… I don’t know how to change the order of the bars in this bar graph, my Excel skills are at their limit. But you can see I read a lot of books from 2020 and a lot from the last ten years. In fact every book except one was written after 1990. This year I was reading so many current books and I really read no classics which is interesting. I think there were just so many new books coming out that I wanted to read that I didn’t even have shelf space to explore older books.

The next graph is the genre of books I was reading…

My favourite genres are Fantasy and Literary Fiction/Contemporary Fiction or however you like to describe it, and that’s pretty evident in this graph. I’m also reading a fair bit of YA which is shown here. I had a little space this year for a few nonfic books – a few political books and one memoir.

If you fancy, you can pop over to my Goodreads to see all the books I read here. Or if you want more data, check out the books I read in 2019.

How does this compare to the books you read in 2020?

You can use the very same template I use to get your own reading data. Just click this link and it’ll take you there.