2022 – My Year in Books

My reading goal for 2022 was 150 books, which turned out to be too ambitious. But I still managed to top 100 books, which is pretty good. Of the 103 books I read, 39 were graphic novels. That’s 9 more than the previous year, when I read more overall.

Book Lengths

The range of book lengths didn’t change very much from 21 to 22.

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So I read more manga and fewer text-based books, but the books I did read were an average of 20 pages longer this year.

Popularity

I finally caught up with the rest of the world and read Circe. For once, the crowd was right. Madeline Miller will be an autobuy for me from now on. Pearl in the Rice is an odd little book. It’s a collection of Vietnamese folk tales, collected by an English pastor who relied on a Vietnamese parishioner to tell him the stories/translate them for him.

Best Loved

You wouldn’t expect it from the title, but Toilet-Bound Hanako is actually quite a good story. I’m sad the anime adaptation ended when it did, because I can’t afford to buy the manga and the library only has a couple volumes.

All the Books

I love revisiting the books I read each year through Goodreads’ cover collection. Do you see anything you’ve read? Anything you want to read?

(I don’t know why my screen grabs are all different widths. Sorry about that.)

MY 2022 BOOKS

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StoryGraph

I don’t love everything about Goodreads, so I started duplicating my reading logs in StoryGraph. It’s not perfect either, so for now I’m double-dipping my data and logging every book I read on both platforms. StoryGraph’s year-end stats include a few new insights that are kind of fun.

Mood

Hmm. That trend line might explain a few things.

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It almost looks like I went on vacation in July and was quarantined in my bedroom in December. June was still my best-read month with 4,387 pages read.

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I’m actually a little surprised. It felt like I was reading more difficult books in 2022. But genre will always win by volume, I guess.

Authors

According to StoryGraph, I read books by 50 different authors. My most-read authors were Rumiko Takahashi (thanks to the ongoing series Mao) Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (thanks to frequent rereadings of the Grandmaster volumes as each new one came out) and Kazu Kibuishi (I’m finally reading Amulet now that my kids have outgrown it).

Nine of the books I read were rereads. Almost half of the books I read – 51 to be exact – were part of a series.