2016 Wrap Up

I kind of don't even want to think about last year, anymore, but I guess I will think about it long enough to wrap up what I read.

I read 78 books last year. Considering that I had made my goal 50 books, that feels like an accomplishment. I suffered through 2 reading slumps, and still managed to reach my goal. So there is 1 bookish resolution met!

Next I resolved to finish the BookRiot Read Harder Challenge. I did eventually finish this. I found that I had actually read a book that took place in the Middle East. I moved that to the Middle East spot and read a different book that was less than 100 pages. 2 bookish resolutions completed!

My third resolution was to Read the Hard Books. I sort of did this at first, but by the middle of the year, I was no longer feeling it. I did read some hard stuff later in the year, like Ghettoside, and Men We Reaped, and Hillbilly Elegy. So, I feel like I did pretty well with that. We'll call it completed.

The next thing I resolved to do was Read My Own Damn Books. I read a total of twelve books I own. This is not a great number. Especially when you consider that half of those I bought or received as gifts during the year. My problem is that I decided to read the Sequoyah Award books. I don't own any of those. Also, I didn't own very many of the book club books. I may try this resolution again another year with better planning.

My fifth goal was to keep track of the books I don't finish. I had a special page of my planner devoted to the list of books I DNFed. So I call that a completed Resolution!

Nest I resolved to read 5 books over 500 pages. That's a nope. I think I managed to get through 3. More than half, but not a completed goal.

My eighth goal was to complete the Modern Mrs. Darcy reading challenge. Well, I got close. I was short about 3 books, but I'm not even mad about it. The way the last third of last year went, I figure close is good enough.

My last goal was to read a specific set of books that I already own. The were The Brone Cabinet (done), The Distant Hours (I tried), Night Film (nope. It's still in it's mailer), Crazy Rich Asians (done), Men We Reaped (done), S (nope), All the Light We Cannot See (nope), Boo (done), The Enchanted (done). So that's 5 of those read, and one I tried, but gave up on. That's better than I thought I did. Especially since that's not the list I remember having. Huh. Oh well. I'm calling it half done and a lesson learned to not give myself a list like that again.

Okay, now for some statistics:

I read a total of 78 books in 2016.

19 of those were Non-Fiction books

24 were straight Fiction books.

3 were Short Story collections

14 were Graphic Novels or Comics

1 was poetry

12 were Science-Fiction or Fantasy

3 were Mysteries

1 was a Play

and 1 was a Romance book.

50 of the books I read last year were written by women.

19 books were in the YA section, and 6 were written for children.

8 of the books I read were written by people of color. That I know of. There could have been more. I haven't been terribly careful about checking out the correctness of my authors' races.

Also, at least one of the books I read was written by a person who is deaf.

That is a total of 21,688 pages read. Not too shabby for what I thought of as a dumpster fire of a year.