I’m still working on a post about my favourite books of 2022, so here I am instead to write a recap of the year! I haven’t done one of these big round-up posts since last year, but Goodreads has shown me all of my reading statistics for the year, and I am still a number nerd.
Reading-wise, this year has been… something. It’s been a little underwhelming as last year was my most ambitious reading year to date, and this year has been spent handling university and life and health rather than reading. However, I’ve still fallen in love with the works of many new authors, and I’ve been making the most of my local library’s app for eBooks.
This year has also been pretty tough. My mental and physical health has been at its worst and I’m yet to fall back in love with writing, the one thing I’ve loved for a huge proportion of my life. And ongoing Covid. We won’t forget about that.
But this blog isn’t going to focus on that: it’s going to focus on all the good books I’ve read this year and how I suddenly need to buy a new bookshelf because the Waterstones half price hardcover sale continues to demolish my bank account.
This post might be long. Let’s begin!
Reading Stats
My reading goal for the year started at 52 books. It’s the goal I’ve set for the past few years as one book per week is manageable with my life commitments, and the length of my reads varies greatly. I decided to increase it to 75 books when I was taking a break from university, but I didn’t have the time to increase it again to match last year’s 100.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how many books I read each month this year:
- January: 10 books (so many great reads this month)
- February: 6 books
- March: 8 books
- April: 4 books
- May: 5 books
- June: 9 books
- July: 11 books (also a lot of new favourites this month)
- August: 9 books
- September: 10 books
- October: 3 books (you can tell that uni kicked in here)
- November: 5 books (the same as last two Novembers)
- December: 4 books
Categories
I am someone who usually feels awful about giving books low ratings and will give one-star books two stars instead. This year, I decided that I should start DNFing books I don’t like, instead of giving them low ratings or bad reviews simply because they’re not for me, unless they were an ARC where I was required to give a review or I had read more than half of the book and felt ‘qualified’ to give an opinion.
I am also someone who finishes reading an averagely good or a good (but not great) book and instantly goes “yes!! very good!! five stars!!” and has to read the reviews to see if it was actually worthy of a full five stars or just a very high four. Even looking through my Goodreads shelves now, I can recognise that there are books that were incredible in the moment but the rating has gone down slightly as time has passed. I’ve tried to fix those so that chart is as accurate as possible.
This year, I gave out a lot more three-star ratings than I have in the past as I’ve tried to be harsher and rate books on the story arcs and character development and other aspects instead of just my enjoyment.
I made a list to record which formats I read the most because that isn’t something I’ve kept track of in previous years. I wasn’t surprised to see that around half of my reads were borrowed from the local library – I’ve gotten back into using my library card in the past few years to make use of the Overdrive app to have infinite book options while I was away at university.
Best and Worst
I’m trying to do a more detailed blog post and video on my favourite and least favourite books of the year (focusing more on favourites), so I’m going to keep this section short and sweet. These are all books I read this year, and I think this is the first time that all of my favourites of the year were released this year.
Best of 2022
- The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh. I read an ARC of this very early on in the year and I’ve been in love with it ever since. It was incredible. I reviewed it here
- The Honeys by Ryan La Sala. This is one of the most ‘me’ books to ever exist and I rated it five stars for hitting so many niche interests.
- Unraveller by Frances Hardinge. I was torn between this and Deeplight because I read them both this year and fell in love with Hardinge as an author, but this is the one that I still think about near daily. I reviewed it here.
At the moment, I don’t have a clear list of least favourite books from the year, or even a list of books I consider to be ‘bad’. There’s a handful of books that didn’t live up to my expectations, and one ARC that I had to DNF, but for once I don’t believe that any of those books were disappointing enough to list.
TandeWrites 