It’s the last day of 2017 – which is really strange – but that means it’s time for my 2017 reading stats! This took me FOREVER, but I love how it turned out, and it was actually really helpful in looking at what I’d like to improve next year.

This year, I read a total of 123 books, which added up to about 42,000 pages. My shortest read was “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back” by Neil Gaiman (which I guess is technically a short story) at 64 pages and my longest book was The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss at exactly 1,000 pages.

Things That Surprised Me:

I was honestly shocked by the number of fantasy books I read this year compared to other genres. I love fantasy, but I wasn’t expecting it to be such a large percentage.

I was also surprised that contemporary was my second most-read genre, since I feel like I rarely pick up contemporary novels.

And I didn’t expect to have read so few banned books, because I usually gravitate towards them. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I do like reading banned books when I can. (A project at work kept me from participating in Banned Books Week this year – I didn’t read ANYTHING the whole week – and that’s usually a big motivator for me, so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Things I’m Happy About:

I’m pretty happy with the number of nonfiction books I read this year, but I would like to get that to at least 25% next year.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that (possibly for the first time ever) I read quite a few more female than male authors. ESPECIALLY since I read so much fantasy this year. And that the majority of authors I read this year were new to me – I discovered some amazing writers!

I only rated a quarter of the books I read this year less than four stars, so I think it was a pretty awesome reading year overall. Lots of new favorites!

Things I’d Like to Work On:

I would like to read more globally. The vast majority of books I read this year were set in America or England, but I read some great books set in other countries (Sweden, Bulgaria, Pakistan, and South Africa were the settings of some of my favorite reads this year). I’d love to read more next year.

I read a decent amount of diverse books this year, but I feel like that number should be a lot higher, because there are so many great ones out there.

I’d also like to pay more attention to own voices books when reading diversely, and have already added it to the tracking page in my 2018 bullet journal. I think I read a fair number of them this year, but I didn’t track them, and I want to next year.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Here’s to a wonderful 2018 and a new year full of great books!

33 thoughts

  4. I love all the stats you made! I definitely will do the same for my own 2017 reading review. It’s wonderful how much you read non fiction, I’m planning to read 20% next year since this year I only read 11%.

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  5. Wow that graphics with your stats are so amazing! I think it’s really great to have such a visual cue to how your reading year looked so you can work out what to read next year. 🙂

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  7. Your stats look amazing. I am inspired to find a nice way to display mine now. Great job reading more non-fiction. I only read like4 this year and only reviewed one of them. I think your goals are totally doable. Happy reading!

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  10. Pingback: 2017’s Year of Reading and 2018’s Bookish Resolutions – Silver Button Books

  13. I’m very impressed with the way you presented those stats! It looks beautiful! Do you have any recommendations from the 123 you read? My goal each year is 24 and I read 26 in 2017 so I was stoked! Haha I just did an end of year reading post too, but it’s not as beautiful as yours! 😍

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    1. Thank you! There were so many good ones! A Man Called Ove, If We Were Villains, The Glass Castle, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Immortalists (which comes out next week) were stand-out favorites.

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    1. Thank you! This was mostly done in Adobe Illustrator. A few of the graphics (like the map) I downloaded as free vectors and recolored. And the pie charts were done in Excel and then I traced them in Illustrator to turn them into vector graphics.

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  16. Awesome graphics! I read and review books for the Historical Novel Society so that’s most of the fiction I read, though I write lots of genres including fantasy. Nonfiction is a true love of mine – I’ve been reading more and more as the years pass. There’s so much to learn!

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    1. Thank you! I’ve been getting more and more into nonfiction as well, and I agree – there is so much to learn. I just keep collecting books on topics I’m interested in.

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