2022 Reading Year in Review

I started doing a specific "Reading Year in Review" post 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 36 books in 2021 to 45 books in 2022, reached it by mid-November, and wound up with 50 books to my credit by year end -- 111% of my goal. (I was secretly hoping to equal or exceed last year's total of 59 books -- but, still not a bad showing! -- especially considering I had a couple of surgeries and medical issues that had an impact on both my vision and my powers of concentration...!) All books read were reviewed on this blog and tagged "2022 books."  
• My Goodreads 2022 Year in Review report tells me I read 50 books with 17,047 pages (versus 59 books with 17,944 pages in 2021). 
• The shortest book I read was "Misfits" by Michaela Coel (112 pages);  the longest was "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt (718 pages). 
• Average book length was 340 pages. 
• The most popular book I read ( = shelved by Goodreads readers) was "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt;  the least popular was "Navigating the Messy Middle" by Ann Douglas.  
• My average Goodreads rating in 2022 was 4.2 stars. 
• The highest-rated book I read was "The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman (average 4.17 stars -- well deserved too!). 
• In 2021, 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 -- although I don't have one of those!). 
• The "moods" of my books were overwhelmingly "emotional," followed by "reflective" and "informational."  
• Most of my books were medium-paced (44%) or slow paced (40%) -- just 17% were considered fast-paced. 
• 52% of my 2022 books were 300-499 pages;  38% were less than 300 pages and just 10% were over 500 pages. 
• 65% of my 2021 books were fiction;  35% non-fiction (same as in 2021).
• My most-read genre in 2022 was memoir, followed by romance, then mystery and historical.   
• StoryGraph also tracks the format of your books, but selects print as the default. It tells me 56% of my books this year were read in print format and 44% digital. This is more accurate than last year, but still not entirely correct... some books did not have a "digital" option so I chose print instead. 
• Most-read authors in 2022 (as in 2021 -- no surprise here):  D.E. Stevenson (8 books) & L.M. Montgomery (5 books). Runners up were Richard Osman, Jann Arden and Marian Keyes (2 books each).
• Average rating 4.15 stars. (Unlike Goodreads, The StoryGraph allows fractional star ratings.) 
• Once again this year, fiction choices outnumbered non-fiction (many of them re-reads, but still...!):  30 fiction, 20 non-fiction.
• Re-reads -- which I started counting as books read in 2020 -- accounted for 5 books of my 2022 total. (I think I calculated that correctly?)  
• My library book club held its last meeting in late February 2020 -- just before the pandemic hit -- and the "Clever Name" online book club has been dormant since summer 2021.  But, online, the Gateway/Lighthouse Women NoMo book club, D.E. Stevenson fan group, and L.M. Montgomery Readathon on Facebook, helped boost my 2022 reading totals and provided me with a lot of reading/discussion pleasure.  
• My book groups were responsible for 22 of the 50 books I read in 2022 -- almost half!  I read 10 books for GW, 7 for DES (4 different books, including 3 counted twice as re-reads), and 5 for the L.M. Montgomery Readathon (3 different books, including 2 counted twice as re-reads, as well as one LMM book -- "The Golden Road" -- read on my own). 
• As noted above, I reached my Goodreads Reading Challenge Goal of 45 books by mid-November, and ended the year with 50 books read -- but I didn't equal my 2021/best-recorded total of 59 books (when my goal was 36).  For 2023, I've decided to maintain my goal of 45 books ( = 3.75 books per month on average), which seems realistic for me right now. 
• I've read more than 45 books in three of the past four years (2019, 2021 and 2022, and almost 45 -- 43 -- in 2020 -- so that seems very do-able.  But I'm hoping I'll be able to improve on my 2022 total, too!  
• While I'm grateful for my book groups and the boost they give to my reading totals, and while I intend to keep up with them in 2023, I'm hoping to be able to read more of my own choices this coming year too.  :)   

• 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. (4.2 stars was my average Goodreads rating this year.)  A few of my favourites (I haven't linked to them here, but they're all reviewed on Goodreads, StoryGraph and this blog): 
• "The Man Who Died Twice" and "The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman (books #2 & #3 in "The Thursday Murder Club" series). 
• "The Boys" by Ron Howard & Clint Howard. 
• "Sisters Behaving Badly" by Maddie Please. 
• "Run Towards the Danger" by Sarah Polley. 
• "My Ticket to Ride" by Janice Mitchell. 
• "Feeding My Mother" and "If I Knew Then" by Jann Arden. 
• "Rachel's Holiday" and "Again Rachel" by Marian Keyes. 
• "Exit" by Belinda Bauer. 
• "Queen High" by C.J. Carey. 
• "Killers of a Certain Age" by Deanna Raybourn. 

Did you meet your reading goals for 2022 (if you set any)? What great books did you read this past year?