Happy New Year’s Eve! I have about an hour before I go out for party party fun times (board games and chilli) to rattle through my annual stats. Well, I find them interesting, even if no-one else does!

In 2015 I read 91 books according to Goodreads, 85 according to my spreadsheet (I think I got a bit lax about recording comics at one point). Which means these stats aren’t quite accurate, but close enough. 37 books were by women and 5 were by a man and a woman, so that’s a pretty even split. 10 were works in translation and 16 were by authors from a country other than the US and UK. Only 8 were classics from my Classics Club list, so I have some catching up to do there.

I’ve just spent a lovely day buying and building a new bookcase with my Dad and his girlfriend, and loading it up with my TBR. I haven’t yet picked my first book of 2016, but I think I have weeded out enough of the old that I am excited by every single book waiting to be read, which is after all how it should be. I’ll post about my TBR cleanse in the new year, hopefully with added photos!

I hope you have a great New Year’s Eve and wish you all the best for 2016.

This year, for the first time, I kept some statistics on the books I read. I didn’t go out of my way to read differently, I just recorded what I felt were the key details, with a view to looking at them at the end of the year. Well, here we are. So what have I learned?

Of my 78 books read in 2012, 12 were non-fiction, 3 poetry and 63 fiction. 32 were written by women, 41 by men and 5 had multiple authors covering both genders, so that’s not a bad split. Only 7 were translated, which is pretty poor. And only 15 of the authors were non-UK, non-US. I think I should work on that.

So will I read differently in 2013? I’d like to try but the TBR is getting unwieldy so my first priority is to stop buying books for a while! And I still have to add the generous pile of Christmas books to the TBR, which will make it even longer…

And now it’s time to do some painting before I can bring in the New Year with some of that Christmas wine. Happy New Year everyone! Do you have any reading resolutions?

EDIT
I’ve just been poring over my spreadsheet again, as I am wont to do, and spotted that while my reading wasn’t as international as I would have liked, I did read something written by at least one author from every continent, and every continent was represented as a setting as well. However, that’s counting America as one continent. If you split it into north and south, then South America is a big glaring omission from my 2012 reads. Good thing I already have a Peruvian book lined up for January!

This was my first full year of book blogging so I thought I’d take a look over what I’ve done.

According to Goodreads I have read 101 books this year (my aim was 100, so yay!) but I have only published 77 reviews, so goodness knows what happened there (actually, I do have a backlog of 10 or so reviews that I am saving to fill the gaps when I start the new year with a couple of big chunksters). Of those 77, one was an audio book and one was a “novelette”.

But what was the gender breakdown? Of the books reviewed, 42 were by men and 35 by women (actually, two were multi-author collections so I have taken the gender of the editor in those cases). As I mentioned here, 44% of books are written by women so my 45% of reviews being of books by women just about scrapes in there.

How international was my reading? It would take some research to figure out where every author lives/lived but a quick count of translations read shows just 13. That doesn’t include foreign (by which I mean non-US, non-UK) authors writing in English, such as Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it’s still something to work on.

All of which I find fascinating and I think I might just start a spreadsheet for the new year (which I’ve seen a few other book bloggers do). I can include nationality, gender and language of author, plus maybe gender of main character? Anything else?

Most importantly, I have enjoyed the majority of the books I have read and look forward to another year of blogging about my reads. Happy New Year everyone!