2021 Reading Year in Review

I started doing a specific "Reading Year in Review" post last year, in 2020. I figured that since I was doing an overall year in review post (which includes some book information anyway), and a blogging year in review post -- and since keeping track of my books is a big thing I normally do on my blog -- my reading life deserved its own year-end wrap-up post too.  :) 

• I increased my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal from 30 books in 2020 to 36 books in 2021, reached it by mid-July and wound up with almost double that number of books finished by year end, with 59 books to my credit, 164% of my goal. (I was secretly hoping to reach 60, when it became apparent that goal might be in reach -- but hey, still not a bad showing!) All books read were reviewed on this blog and tagged "2021 books."
• My Goodreads 2021 Year in Review report tells me I read 59 books with 17,944 pages. 
• The shortest book I read was "Before and After" by Alison Wilson (168 pages);  the longest was "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown (559 pages). 
• Average book length was 304 pages. 
• The most popular book I read ( = shelved by Goodreads readers) was "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens;  the least popular was "Unimaginable" by Brooke D. Taylor. 
• My average Goodreads rating in 2021 was 4.1 stars. 
• The highest-rated book I read was "The Mother of All Dilemmas" by Kathleen Guthrie Woods (average 4.8 stars). 
• I also started tracking books on The StoryGraph (which Brooke told me about), which provides slightly different stats (and even more, with a paid subscription). Only 54 of my 59 2021 books (16,652 pages) made it there in the transfer of data from Goodreads. 
• The "moods" of my books were overwhelmingly reflective and emotional. 
• Most of my books were medium or slow paced (45 & 38%, respectively) -- just 17% were considered fast-paced. 
• 55% of my 2021 books were 300-499 pages;  40% were less than 300 pages and just 6% were over 500 pages. 
• 65% of my 2021 books were fiction;  35 non-fiction. 
• My most-read genre in 2021 was historical, followed by memoir, then romance and biography.  
• StoryGraph also tracks the format of your books, but selects print as the default. It tells me 83% of my books this year were read in print format -- which I know is not correct. I suspect the format data didn't translate well in the transfer of data from Goodreads. Hopefully the data will be somewhat more accurate next year! 
• Most-read authors in 2021 (no surprise here):  D.E. Stevenson & L.M. Montgomery. 
• Average rating 4.04 stars. (Unlike Goodreads, The StoryGraph allows fractional star ratings.) 
• For the first time in many years, fiction choices outnumbered non-fiction (many of them re-reads, but still...!):  36 fiction, 22 non-fiction and 1 volume of poetry.
• Re-reads -- which I started counting as books read in 2020 -- accounted for 9 books of my 2021 total. (I think I calculated that correctly?)  
• My library book club held its last meeting in late February 2020 -- just before the pandemic hit -- but online, the Gateway Women book club, D.E. Stevenson fan group, L.M. Montgomery Readathon on Facebook, and "Clever Name" online book club  have helped boost my 2021 reading totals and provided me with a lot of reading/discussion pleasure during a very difficult year.  
• I read 8 books for GW, 10 for DES (6 different books, including 4 counted twice as re-reads), 7 for the L.M. Montgomery Readathon (5 different books, including 3 counted twice as re-reads, as well as one LMM book ("Emily's Quest") read on my own)., and 6 for Clever Name. 
• Since I reached 36 books fairly easily this year (by July), I've decided to stretch a bit and increase my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal to 45 books ( = 3.75 books per month on average) for 2022. I've read more than 45 books in two of the past three years (2019 & 2021, and almost 45 in the third year -- 43 in 2020), so I think that's a reasonable/realistic goal to set. 

• It's always very hard for me to pick a single book as "the best." I read some really, really good books this year -- very few disappointments or "meh" choices -- and I gave lots/most of them four and five-star reviews on Goodreads. (4.1 stars was my average Goodreads rating this year.)  A few of my favourites (and forgive me for not including links!): 
• "The Thursday Murder Club" by Richard Osman 
• "Confessions of a Forty-Something" by Alexandra Potter 
• "The Bright Side" by Cathrin Bradbury 
• "The Blue Castle" by L.M. Montgomery (a re-read of one of my all-time favourites) 
• "Widowland" by C.J. Carey 
• "American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser 
• "The Windsor Knot" by S.J. Bennett 
• "Sorrow and Bliss" by Meg Mason 
• "Us" by David Nicholls 
• "Hungry" by Grace Dent 
• "The Storyteller" by Dave Grohl 

Did you meet your reading goals for 2021 (if you set any)? What great books did you read this past year?