2020 Year End Reading Stats

(Note: The book listed as one page in length actually had no pagination.)

It's the last day of 2020 and that means it's time for reflection. It's also time for my favourite kind of pie -- pie charts! -- to see how well I did in my efforts to read diversely, and how this compares to previous years. 

44% of my reading was actually listening to audiobooks (166 of them).
Ebook reading was up from last year: 7% in 2020 vs 2.5% in 2019, strictly due to access.

31% were by queer authors in 2020, versus 29% in 2019

In 2020, 35% of my reading was written by people of colour and 5% by Indigenous authors,
which is about the same as in 2019.

26% of the books I read were either by men or various authors.
The rest (74%) were by women, trans and nonbinary authors.
My effort to read more women is working, because in 2019, 30% were written by men.

I read 35 books in translation and 2 in French this year, which is about 10% of the total.
Last year I did slightly better, with 46 books (12%) in translation or in French language.

At the start of 2020, for the first time I began keeping track of something else: my sources of reading material. And then COVID happened, which shifted my usual formats and usual sources to more digital library materials (rather than print, since the public libraries were closed for part of the pandemic) and more online purchases from my local bookshops. 

All of which in turn prompted me to look at the value that I get out of my library. I spent a little over $2,000 on books this year, which is quite a bit more than is usual for me. If I would have purchased ALL of the books I read, I would have spent more than 75 per cent of my annual pension, so I am deeply grateful to the Edmonton Public Library.

The totals for the skinny pie pieces are: 9 received as gifts; 
5 from the publisher; 5 loaned to me by friends from their personal collections.

Another thing that happened was being invited to participate in a Shadow Giller jury. 63 out of the 120 Canadian books that I read this year fall under that category. It was a memorable experience, and is probably the reason that my percentage of Canadian books jumped from 26% in 2019 to 32% of my total read in 2020.

Something new I discovered this year is that popular science is my comfort read. Never too old to learn new things... about myself and about the world.

30% of my reading was nonfiction in 2020, down somewhat from 2019 (38%).
I am guessing it's because Giller reading edged out some of the nonfiction this year.

One more thing that I like to do at the end of the year is to see how well I did in Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for this year, simply by chance, without having looked at the categories ahead of time. I will save those results for tomorrow's post.