300 books on Goodreads since 2014

I used to keep track of my reading via LibraryThing and then a number of other sites and services before landing on Goodreads in 2014. A couple of months ago when I realized that I was approaching 300 books finished, I started drafting this post in anticipation of reaching the number, which I did at the end of October…

…or so I thought.

Then I noticed that while I had factored in The Lord of the Rings as a collection, adding two, and adding one, The Sun Also Rises that I had just finished as part of another collection of four novels by Hemingway, I had forgotten to add in one other collection of two novels: Wind and Pinball by Haruki Murakami – hence the asterisk in the graphic above.

The numbers have gone steadily down in the last six years, as the chart above shows: from the highs of 64 in 2014 and 82 in 2015 to middling numbers with 48 in 2016 and 45 in 2017 and last year with 33 and this year (so far) 29. I’m about on target for what I read last year, if not hopefully a little more than that number.

With this month Nonfiction November, I would also be remiss if I didn’t break down my reading into fiction and nonfiction. Sadly, I have been remiss in my nonfiction reading, with only 39, or 13 percent, of the 300 nonfiction. Also in the low numbers are graphic novels at 17 and poetry at 14. However, in the high numbers are series, especially series related to crime, with 189 out of the 300, or 63 percent, being series and out of those 137 are crime-related. Ironically, one book with “crime” in the title, Born A Crime by Trevor Noah, I did not count as crime-related.

Overall, I had 41 books that I rated five stars; 37, 3 stars, and only 2, 2 stars. Most were better than average, but somehow just short of great. However, an additional 13 that I didn’t give five stars, I still considered favorites despite that missing “something.” I would have made more infographics, but to be honest, just putting together these two, especially the first one was fairly time- and labor-intensive, since I’m not super tech-savvy. That said, I decided to try Piktochart after seeing a post in which Sarah at Sarah’s Bookshelves used the design website and I’m glad I did.

So what do all these numbers mean?

What all these numbers mean is…well, I read a lot of series, mostly crime-related, and not a lot of nonfiction. The good news is that this year out of the 28 books, I’ve read so far, 12 of them have been nonfiction or about 43 percent. Of course, that percentage is bolstered since the numbers overall are down. I attribute that to a number of factors, including stress over thinking about health, work, and politics (although at least one of those is improving for both me and my wife) and an increase in watching streaming apps like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu.

Does this mean that I will change anything for the future? I have high hopes to read more nonfiction than I have been, but probably I’ll continue to read mostly crime fiction series and even have a few new-to-me series in my TBR (to-be-read) pile already. Through October, I’ve done pretty well on reading nonfiction for me, with a total of 11, which is a high for me in a year. I have a number of nonfiction books in my TBR too for the next year (or two or three, let’s be honest), many of which I’ll be mentioning in a blog post tomorrow and then next week for Nonfiction November. Stay tuned!

So numbers aside, do you find trends in your own reading? Do you tend to read on one subject or in one genre? Or all you over the place?

Note: I realized that as I ended drafting this post that I neglected to mention young adult books so I went back and added them up for a total of 27 books, if I counted right. I only learned about many of them from book bloggers and without doing a count, I’d say a fair amount of them were among my favorites.

In case you missed the first two Nonfiction November posts, here are the links: Nonfiction November: A Look Back At My Year in Nonfiction and Nonfiction November: A no-brainer fiction/nonfiction pairing. I’ll be back tomorrow for Week 3.