My 2019 in Books

Another year, another Goodreads Challenge. Since I started reading so many graphic novels, setting my challenge goal has been a challenge in itself. On the one hand, I happily recognize graphic novels as real books. On the other hand, it takes about one hour to read a volume of manga, where the average novel takes about 12 hours. So I set a ridiculously high goal that includes both, but I try to sort my results so I can see how much “regular reading” I did apart from “graphic reading.” I’m probably the only person who cares about my reading data, but since I got to read a lot of interesting books last year, you might want to read on to discover some cool stories.

Totals

In 2019, my reading goal was 150 books.

At first, I thought I didn’t quite make it. My original report said 135 books and I blamed Webtoons. My daughter introduced me to Webtoons early in the year, and I ended up spending a lot of time reading on that app. There are some great stories on there, but I haven’t figured out a way to capture that reading, yet. For the record, I’m a big fan of #blessed, Lookism, Lore Olympus, The Croaking, Siren’s Lament, True Beauty and many more.

But when I started writing this post, I noticed that I had not entered completion dates for a lot of books. When I filled them in to match the dates I entered them into Goodreads, my score went way up. I had actually read 164 books last year; 80 of those were graphic novels and 84 were regular books.

Compared to Others

I’m not really interested in comparing my reading to others’. But it’s kind of cool to see which were the most and least popular books I read.

Books I Read

Here is the complete list of books I read in 2019. You’ll see lots of manga. Ooku was pretty intense alternate-history; Horimiya, Silver Spoon, and Barakamon were gentle slice-of-life stories. There’s also a lot of kidlit, since I like to keep up with what my daughter reads (plus there’s some great stuff in kidlit. The images below were collected before I recovered nearly 20 mislabeled books, and the leave out a few really good reads. For a complete list of books I read in 2019, with hyperlinks, you can visit the report on Goodreads.

See anything you like?

Hindsight and 2020

Since I handily met my 2019 reading goal even with the intrusion of Webtoons, I’m setting my 2020 goal to 175 books. I’m already behind schedule for that goal, but what the heck, it’s fun to try. Have you read any good books lately?