Every year since 2014, I’ve tried to do an audit of my reading, as well as a list of my favorite books of the year. It’s my way of keeping myself accountable,
2021 Overview
I read 209 books in 2022, finishing 204 of them. I reviewed just 55 of them – my worst reviewing year on record – and rated 43 o them at 9 or above.
For the second time, I split out the print library books from the library ebooks. Total library usage was 79.8%, up 3% from 2021. Review copies totaled 9.7%, just slightly more than books I purchased for myself.
Audiobooks and graphic novels are both holding relatively steady from 2021. My ebook reading edged up a couple of percentage points this year – I was unable to drive for the last two months of the year.
Audiobooks and graphic novels are both holding relatively steady from 2021. My ebook reading edged up a couple of percentage points this year – I was unable to drive for the last two months of the year.
What I Read
Fantasy still far in the lead, as usual, with jumps in Romance and Sci-Fi. 2022 needed lots of escapist reading!
Nearly unchanged from last year, but books for younger readers sinking ever lower.
The Authors
I’m trying not to be hard on myself for only a 1% increase in my reading by authors of color over last year.
I got curious about what I’m sharing here vs. what I’m reading for myself. I’m much happier with these percentages.
I haven’t made any effort to read authors outside of the US. It’s just fun to see the map! Other countries represented here are Canada, the UK, Ireland, the Phillipines, Ghana, Nigeria, Germany, Australia and Brazil.
This is about the same as last year. The tiny unlabeled slices are multi-gender author partnerships.
The Characters
In 2019, my percentage of white characters was 39%, in 2020 34%, and in 2021 40%. I’m not doing great here, though I would say I have fewer books by white people about authors of color than I once did.
Changing things up a bit, I split my one column for other diversity types into four. Here’s my total book count of non-Christian religions. Native American, Chinese, and Korean traditional religious practices are all shown in one category.
Here’s the other diversity stats besides ethnicity and religion, mirroring the diversity aspects we’re now tracking in my library’s book orders. In actual book numbers, this translates to 46, 30, and 36 respectively.
I’ve been doing these graphs for several years now – here they are from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. As always, if you know of any middle grade or teen books, especially fantasy books, that would help me round out the diversity of my reading, please let me know! And if you have thoughts on these stats or other things you’d like to see, let me know in the comments.
I tried to do a year in review once along similar lines but found it very hard to at the time (maybe 10 years ago?) to find out how the authors identified. Perhaps it has gotten easier?
I decided not to record books that I quit reading after just a chapter or two… so that does skew the statistics. I recently found a list of the books I read in 10th grade- also right around 200 books.
alibrarymama 
I tried to do a year in review once along similar lines but found it very hard to at the time (maybe 10 years ago?) to find out how the authors identified. Perhaps it has gotten easier?
It has gotten much easier! Many more authors include their ethnicity in their bios. But I don’t stress it if I can’t find it.
Wow! You’ve read a lot of books in 2022 and finished most of them. Katy is right about it being easier to find more diverse authors now.
I decided not to record books that I quit reading after just a chapter or two… so that does skew the statistics. I recently found a list of the books I read in 10th grade- also right around 200 books.