Reflecting on 2016: Reading

Y’all probably tired of me by now because I’m here again with another 2016 reflection piece, one that I don’t need to do after the crazy long Reading Survey, but one I’ll do regardless because I want to. 😀 I like rereading these reflection posts, especially the reading ones, to see what I thought of the previous year. I often do that toward a year’s end.

The theme for 2016 was Perspective, and boy did I need to remember that when it came to reading. Being in the online book community sometimes make me feel as if I need to read more and more books to keep up with everyone who read mountains of books throughout the year. Unfortunately, I’m unable to do so without cutting corners, like reading short books just to stuff in more in a month, but good thing I caught myself at it and changed what I was doing. If I’d continued on that route, reading for pleasure would no longer be pleasurable.

For 2016, I initially set my Goodreads goal to 60 books. For some reason, I started to freak out in late January/early February thinking I wouldn’t be able to complete 60 books in the year so I started cutting corners by reading a short book, George R.R. Martin’s illustrated children’s book The Ice Dragon. I reprimanded myself for that and dropped my goal to 35 books. But later I realized that I did pretty well when not paying attention to my Goodreads goal and had made such great progress that I bumped my goal back up to 60. I’m glad to report that I surpassed that goal by reading a total of 88 books, comics, and picture books. Yes, the comics and picture books are shorter but I count them anyway and except for the Martin book, I didn’t read them to cut corners.

I read no magazines this year, despite purchasing some, however, I read lots of articles and I’m glad for that. They were great substitutes for the magazines and perfect stand-ins for books when there was a lull in my reading. At this point, I usually do a long review of all the books I read in the past year, but I’ll omit that this year because 1. I read a lot, 2. I’m lazy, and 3. I think I’m tired (though I just got up). I’ll do a bunch of stats instead so I hope future me who loves to read these at the end of the year won’t be too upset at getting just stats instead. 😛

I’ll do this in the form of my quarterly reading roundups with a few extra stuff thrown in since I used Brock’s awesome spreadsheet to keep track of what I read this year. If anyone else is interested in going crazy on tracking their reading, see Brock’s 2017 spreadsheet here.

Favorites of the bunch

Books

The Night Circus

Station Eleven

Anna and the Swallow Man

Thunder & Lightning

salt.

Comics

The Arrival

Superman: Red Son

Fullmetal Alchemist

Saga, Vol. 3

Velvet, Vol. 1

Articles

Marlon James: Why I’m Done Talking About Diversity (lithub.com)

Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person (huffingtonpost.com)

Managing Your Feelings Is Not My Job (hecatedemeter.wordpress.com)

Women of Harry Potter (tor.com)

I’m Not an Asshole. I’m an Introvert. (newyorker.com)

Podcasts

Jesse William’s Acceptance Speech at the BET Awards (bet.com)

Hardcore Game of Thrones (soundcloud.com)

Maria Popova on Being Interesting, Creating More Time in a Day, And How to Start A Successful Blog (fourhourworkweek.com)

Tan Twan Eng — The Garden of Evening Mists (bbc.co.uk)

Talking About the Weather with Lauren Redniss (thelitupshow.com)

The Witches of Salem with Stacy Schiff (thelitupshow.com)

TV shows

The Strain

This Is Us

Stranger Things

Blacklist

Least liked

Books

Air Awakens

Caraval

Crown of Midnight

The Witches of East End

Pride & Prejudice

Comics

From Under Mountains, #1

Boy-1, #1

Pisces, #1

Faith, #1

Revenge of the Green Lanterns

Best storytelling

Books

‘Salem’s Lot

The Night Circus

Station Eleven

Song of Kali

The Martian

Comics

Superman: Red Son

The Arrival

Fullmetal Alchemist

The Sculptor

This One Summer

Best writing

The Life of Elves

When Breath Becomes Air

Jane Eyre

Station Eleven

‘Salem’s Lot

Best narration [for audiobooks]

You

Best illustrations

Comics

Fullmetal Alchemist

The Arrival

Saga

Monstress

Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant

Illustrated books

Templeton Twins Have an Idea

Armstrong

The Sound of Things

The Only Child

Most unique writing/story/other form

A Time Code

Best book titles

When Breath Becomes Air

A Time Code

salt.

The Arrival

When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain

Awesome covers

Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Jane Eyre

Big Magic

Air Awakens

Lady Mechanika

Reading challenge hits ‘n’ misses

**2016 reading challenges announcement**

Goodreads

Goal: 60

Read: 88

Success or Fail

Books I told myself to read in 2016

Goal: 8

Read: 3

Success or Fail

2016 Horror Reading Challenge

Goal: 5

Read: 5

Success or Fail

**But of the books I assigned for myself, I read only 2. Lol!**

Book Riot 2016 Read Harder Challenge

Challenges: 24

Completed: 13

Success or Fail

2016 Ancient Greek Reading Challenge

Goal: 4

Read: 0.5

Success or Fail

2016 Bardathon Challenge

Goal: 3

Read: 0

Success or Fail

Classics Club Reading Challenge

Read: 3.5

Success or Fail

**Actually, it’s a fail because I’m suppose to complete the challenge by 2017, but whatever. I read classics.**

Reading stats

Read = 88

Reread = 14

DNF’d = 5

Format

Books = 40

Comics = 23

E-books = 14

Audio books = 8

Mangas = 3

Genre

Fantasy = 34

Sci-fi = 17

Nonfiction = 8

Contemporary = 7

Action/Adventure = 5

Horror = 5

Romance = 3

Historical = 2

Literary = 2

Supernatural = 2

Mystery =1

Poetry = 1

Thriller = 1

**These numbers include comics, mangas, and the children’s picture books I read. Magical realism novels were added to fantasy. **

Ownership

New (bought in/after 2015) = 43

Library = 33

Mine (bought before 2015) = 5

ARC = 4

Friends = 3

Author Gender

Female = 52

Male = 35

Both = 1

Other stats

I read a lot of comics and illustrated books this year, which usually have a lower page count. Therefore 24% of the materials I read were between 100-199 pages, followed by 18% of them ranging between 300-399 pages.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of what I read was published in the 2000’s. I also read 7 items published in the 1990’s and 3 items published before the 1920’s.

I started 8 new series, completed 1, and gave up on 2. However, I have a whopping 38 series on the go, says my stats. (Actually, I have more than that if I should include others I didn’t read during 2016.) And, of course, I read more books that are a part of series than standalones.

According to the stats, I averaged about 7 books per month (more like 5 books, I think) and have given an average of 3.9-star ratings. I gave a lot of books 5- and 3-star ratings last year.

As for purchases, I mostly bought comics (because of the Small Press Expo); however the majority of newly acquired books were received in May, when I attended BookCon. That event is like catnip for booklovers.

And that’s it for the stats. I think I prefer this form for my year-end reading wrap-up rather than the extended paragraph one.

Reading plans for the new year:

Enter less challenges

Set a lower reading goal

The books of 2016

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