2019 Reading Challenge Recap

For those of you who have followed the blog for a while, you may have been aware that in 2019 (which is now, somehow, past tense) I was participating in a reading challenge. I decided to try and read 50 books, roughly one a week.

In the end, I read 54, and reviewed all but one of them¹. I don’t know when I decided to review everything I read, or why I thought that would be a good idea, but it was a good experiment. I realised that I read a lot more romance than I realised, I realised I re-read more than I would have guessed, and I had it confirmed that I read series far more than I read standalone novels. If you’re interested, you can find the list of everything I read (with links to the reviews) here.

I’ve included some of the trends and statistics I noticed, while looking over the books I read last year, and I’ve included them below for your reading pleasure.

♦I read four anthologies; three were provided for review, and one I purchased myself. Of these, two were a continuation of a series I had read previously (and the other two contained short stories by authors I know and like)

♦I received twenty four books to review in 2019, the majority of them through Netgalley

♦Not including the people who wrote short stories in the anthologies, I read works from 16 new authors last year

♦I re-read eighteen books in 2019, a solid third of those in the last portion of the year when I went on a Women of the Otherworld reading binge

♦Forty of the books I read were part of a series (!), but of those, fourteen were the first book of a series, and only one of those fourteen was a re-read

All in all-2019 was a good year of reading for me, but I will not be reviewing everything I read in 2020 or beyond. I think once a series reaches a certain length, reviews aren’t as necessary or interesting for most people, but feel free to correct me if you disagree. I know I read reviews for series I’m solidly a fan of while I’m waiting to buy/read the next book in a series, but I’m not sure if other people do too. If you’ve read this far, or you did a reading challenge in 2019, let me know how it went, I’d love to hear from you. And happy new year!

 

¹I will be reviewing that one too, but I finished reading it on December 31st, so I haven’t yet reviewed it as of January 1st