After the list of my 2022 favorites, here are my statistics.
Then tomorrow you can see the fun I had with the titles I read in 2022.
Year of reading 2022
Part 2: Statistics
I have used Book Roast’s CAWPILE, so I have even more graphs to share with you!
But she counts some things differently, so I’ll include my own graphs as needed.
With 140 books, that is, 20 more than my original goal, 2022 was a very good year of reading for me.
Let’s look at it more closely.
My total numbers of books read/listened to is actually the highest ever since I have started tracking it seriously through Goodreads and Google sheets:
92 books reads (92 in 2021!), and 48 listened to (73 in 2021) = 140 (165 in 2021), which is an average of 11.6/month (165 books in 2021, with a monthly average of 13.75).
Books read in 2022:
92. That’s an average of 7.6/month
Total of 20,399 pages (21,654 in 2021), which is an average of 55 pages/day (59 in 2021).
That’s an average of 221 pages/book (235 in 2021).
So I tend to read shorter books.
Books listened to in 2022:
48 [73 in 2021]. This is an average of 4/month (6 in 2021)
Total of 24,600 minutes (22,153 min in 2021) with an average of 67 min/day (60 in 2021)
That’s an average of about 8.5 hours/audiobook. (5 hours/audiobook in 2021).
So, much longer audiobooks than in 2021, which makes sense,
as in 2021, I listened to a lot of Biblical books, which tend to be shorter.
In graphs, this is what it looks like:
Total books, print and audio
With only 6 months above an average of 50 pages/day, not as impressive as 2021.
Definitely happy here, with 8 months having an average of over 60 minutes per day – it means the house should be rather clean, as I only listen to audio books while doing house chores and gardening.
Nice diversity, getting more balanced.
With a major increase in scifi (double)
and children’s lit (five times more, mostly classics)
Here again, things get more balanced.
Less audio, more ebooks.
11% more female authors than last year.
Male/female doesn’t matter for me,
as long as they know how to write well!
The diversity that counts for me is country of origin
and languages, as you can see below
Exact same number of nationalities as last year,
but with different countries.
English books are less than 50%. See details below.
One more language than last year, as I read my first book in Italian.
In translation: 31 [52 in 2021 – due to Biblical books] 22% of all books read
- 16 from the Japanese
- 4 from the French
- 4 from the Russian
- 23 from the Spanish
- 1 from the Chinese
- 1 from the German
- 1 from the Norwegian
- 1 from the Swedish
In original language other than English: 41 – 29% of all books read
40 in French
1 in Italian
***
Out of a Total of 115 authors (105 in 2021)
59 were new to me (51%. It was 50% in 2021)
Books by the same author: 41 [69 in 2021]:
6 by Georges Simenon
5 by T.H. White
4 by Michel bussi
2 by Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, Keigo Higashino,
Guy de Maupassant, Marc Levy, Jules Verne, Serge Joncour, René Barjavel,
David Foenkinos, Laurent Gounelle,
Diane Setterfield, Dorothy Gilman, Josephine Tey
8 Re-Reads: [28 in 2021, because of my Biblical project] 5%
Mostly read with French students
Le Pays où l’on n’arrive jamais, by André Dhôtel
Le Horla et autres nouvelles, by Maupassant
Cyrano de Bergerac, by Rostand
Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier
De la Terre à la Lune, by Jules Verne
Le Petit Prince, by Saint-Exupéry
Human Nature, by Serge Joncour (read before in French)
Beginning to Pray, by Anthony Bloom, read twice in 2022
Only 22% of very recent books, less and less every year.
Many more from the 19th century than before.
Oldest: The Year of My Life, by Issa Kobayashi (1852)
Newest: Progress Report, by Roman Lando, December 9, 2022
Most books bought are part of my EStories audio subscription,
and books that have been on my TBR for a while.
About same balance as last year
33 countries these books led me to (24 last year):
France (37), US (30)
England (23), Japan (21)
6 books set in Russia
5 in space (one of these was on the moon)
4 in Antarctica
3 in Canada, Israel, Italy
2 in Argentina
1 in Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, Belarus, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, China, Tibet, India, New Zealand, Australia.
Plus in Persia, on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in an unidentified desert, in the Amazonia region, around the Panama canal, and somehwre on Earth after some type of apocalyptic event.
I visited 10 US States:
Arkansas, California (5), Colorado, Florida, Illinois (2), Mississippi, Minnesota,
New York (2), Vermont, and Washington (2)
Shortest book: Dojoji, by Yukio Mishima – 33 pages
12 books under 100 pages – mosly novellas and children’s books
Longest book: Ensemble, c’est tout, by Anna Gavalda – 574 pages
7 books over 400 pages
Shortest audiobook:
The Story of the Other Wise Man, by Henry Van Dyke – 53 minutes
Longest audiobook:
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils/ The Further Adventures, by Selma Lagerlöf – 17H06
Funniest: Revenge of the Libraries, by Tom Gauld
Most Unique Books:
The Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov:
“A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog, whom he names Sharik, and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man”.
The Cloven Discount, by Italo Calvino:
This is a very weird (and hilarious too) book, about a viscount (and the narrator’s uncle), who gets split into two by a cannonball during battle. So now, we have two viscounts, a good one and a bad one. The story follows both, and makes us reflect I believe on human nature.
Most tearjerker: The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico
Most disappointing: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
Creepy: The Last House on Needless Street, by Catriona Ward
Eye-opener: Digital Hell: The Inner Workings of a “like”, by Guillaume Pitron
Best reading companions:
Agatha Christie Poirot, by Mark Aldridge
Cliffs Notes on The Sound and the Fury, by James Roberts
Beautiful illustrations:
A Brush With Birds: Paintings and Stories from the Wild, by Richard Weatherly
Red is my Heart, by Antoine Laurain
Biggest discovery:
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, by Isabella Lucy Bird
Favorite characters of the year:
Bastien (Entre eux mondes), Laurus (Laurus), Mary (Jamaica Inn),
Alexandre (Human Nature), Vadassy (Epitaph for a Spy),
Raymond McPheron (Eventide), Dilsey (The Sound and the Fury),
Philip and Fritha (The Snow Goose)
Classics I finally got to read:
I read 71 classics, that is 50% of all my 2022 books.
Check my 3rd (tab “sheet 1) and 4th list (tab “sheet 4”) of the Google doc
posted in this post, for the Classics Club.
The ones with the red margins are the ones I read – with the date.
Books present for a while on my TBR that I finally got to read
(other than the classics just mentioned):
Thomas Jefferson’s Crème brûlée, by Thomas J. Craughwell
Le Voyage d’Octavio, by Miguel Bonnefoy
Eventide, by Kent Haruf
Ensemble, c’est tout, by Anna Gavalda
Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit
Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, by Haruki Murakami
A is For Alibi, by Sue Grafton
This Holy Man: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, by Gillian Crow
The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin
Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin
Which authors new to me in 2021 that I now want to keep reading?
Eric Ambler, Isabella Lucy Bird, John Buchan, Blake Crouch, David Foenkinos,
Paul Gallico, Anna Katharine Green, Alexander Grin, Kanae Minato, E. Nesbit, Guillaume Pitron, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, Bernard Werber,
Cornell Woolrich
I have read more books from series than I thought:
From the new ones started this year (18 series),
I want to keep reading books coming after:
The Three-Body Problem, Les Fourmis, The Man in the Queue, Fer-de-Lance,
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, The Roman Hat Mystery, The 39 Steps,
The Leathenworth Case, The Story of the Treasure Seekers
Best title:
It Can’t Happen Here
Longest book title:
Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America
Shortest book title:
NOA, by Marc Levy
MORE FUN RECAP TOMORROW!
Words And Peace 