2019 Reading Recap & 2020 Ambitions

Life has been busy, so it’s taken most of January 2020 to wrap up my Best of 2019. I’ll link them here ICYMI.

• Best Classics
• Best Fiction
• Best Nonfiction
• Best Audiobooks

Now that’s finished, I can recap and reflect on my 2019 reading year.

2019 Reading Stats

GoodReads goal read 52 books. Total books read 111

My specific goals included reading short stories, poetry, nonfiction, and my biggest and always challenging, shop your shelf goal, meaning, I read the books I already have on my shelf.

So here’s how that breaks down by genre:

• 5% short stories (total of 5)
• > 1% poetry (total of 1)
• 18% nonfiction (total of 20)
• 26% classics (total of 29)
• 23% fiction (total of 25)
• 20% historical fiction (total of 22)
• 8% mystery (total of 9)

Writing Reviews

I also wanted to be more intentional about reading, then writing reviews shortly after to share on the blog. This one still needs some work but I’m finding that it’s a mixed bag. Some reviews the words pour and others I need more time to formulate my thoughts so not forcing the process.

Tracking My Books

I wanted to track my reading across a few categories (see below) but I don’t have an accurate accounting on my oldest books and trying to make one was tiresome so I didn’t do well with this.

• Oldest book shelved
• Newest book shelved
• Random Pick
• Non-fiction

Instead, I have something simpler. If we don’t factor in the fact that some of these were added to my shelf this year (giveaways, gifted books, review copies) I did a stellar job at about 66%. But I’ll break it down below to be fair.

• 50% were books I owned
• 16% were review books
• 33% were borrowed from my library

In 2020, I’ll go back to the simple category of owned versus borrowed. Easy peasy. I also created a shelf on GoodReads for review books so I can keep track for 2020.

Tomes of the year award

The five longest books of 2019 exceeded total page count of my longest five last year by 462 pages, for a grand total of 4,442 pages, an average of 888.4 pages. Coincidence that all of them were buddy reads or readalongs. A trend for 2 years now.

• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Roots
• Daniel Deronda
• Anna Karenina
• East of Eden

2020 Reading Ambitions

For 2020, I’m keeping things simple with tracking my books as I mentioned above.

I liked my weekly blog post feature, My Week in Books and Tea in 2019. I had a lot of fun sharing fun things outside of reading and tea, like trips to the symphony and food truck fun. I’ll bring that back or reboot that format going forward in 2020 (February is a good time to start right).

I’m also challenging myself with what I choose to read. I recently announced on Instagram a reading challenge I created called Steeped in Short Stories #steepedinshortstories. Last year I discovered the beauty in short stories when I didn’t read them straight through expecting a novel. That’s not the purpose of a short story. I’ve linked the details above. In short, the idea is for you to pick up a collection of short stories throughout the year and use the hashtag to share them. If you have followed my blog you know, tea is my favorite beverage so tea puns are a must.