2019 Reading Wrap-up

Well, I read a lot this past year.  Sometimes to the exclusion of everything else.  I know... duh.

I finished the year having read 120 books.  If you want to stroll through the wrap-ups, follow this link.  That should be all the posts sorted by date (and some other posts you can scroll past).  Might take a while since there should be about 52 of those suckers.

Unlike previous years, I am not going to scan through all the entries on my reading list and give you genre stats.  It's tedious and boring and I don't want to do it.  If you're new here, I read all sorts of stuff.  I used to say I read everything, but obviously I don't read everything.  I'm still not into manga, so you'll never see it here.  Self-help ain't my bag either.  On the rare occasion, I'll read horror, but it has to be a really grabby book and not too heavy on the gore.  As with everything, the story is the key.  Which is why you don't see an awful lot of non-fiction in my reading lists.

Of the books I read, 41 fell under the 'new to me and underappreciated' umbrella.  So I totally nailed that goal.  I read six Book Twos, just hitting that goal.  And I slid in one Book Three for good measure on an underappreciated indie series I really enjoy.

Easy enough to say I read 120 books.  But what about the DNFs?  In 2019, I started 72 books I did not finish reading - mostly ebooks, but some hardcopies.  Some weeks I had no DNFs, but there were weeks where I DNF'd as many as 5 books.  The last week of the year was bad for DNFs and I hit 6 books I didn't finish.  The genres run the gamut, so there really isn't a genre I can point to and say 'those are the ones I'm more likely to stop reading'.  The most I spent on a book I didn't finish reading was $3.99, and man, was that ever a bummer.

According to my nifty 'acquired books' spreadsheet, I got 188 new-to-me books this year.  For those, I spent a mere $77.20.  There were 121 ebooks for $50.27 and 67 hardcopies for $26.93.  Not bad considering some years in the past the dollar totals were in the $500-$600 range.  I attribute this miserly accomplishment to loads of budget friendly ebooks, free ebooks, and super cheap used books.  Yes, Virginia, you can read lots of books when you don't have lots of money to buy lots of books.  As far as I can tell, I only bought one hardcopy book at full price, and that was $3.93 at Wallyworld.  The most I spent for any single ebook was $4.99 and that was a 2nd book I really needed to read NOW.  It was totally worth it.

Starting the year, my goal was to read 90 books.  I upped that number to 120 in September, then I did NaNoWriMo and totally blew my November reading all to hell.  Thus, I really had to scramble at the end of the year to make that goal.  I met my goal Sunday afternoon.  This year, I'm going in at a goal of 70 and if I need to increase that, I will.  BUT I'm hoping to actually be busy writing in 2020, so not a whole lot of extra time for reading.

How was your reading year in 2019?  Do you have a goal for this year?