2017 Reading List Roundup

Well if you thought I was fashionably late with my 2016 Reading List Roundup last year (posted in August 2017) then you’ll be shocked that I am posting a round up of my 2017 reading list in October 2018.

This is my second year of trying to compile a snapshot of the books I read in the past year complete with some info graphics and stats. As stated last year this analysis is more for my own benefit than some public declaration of “Look how much/little I have read in the past year!”

The other thing I would like to state up front is that I tend to listen to more books than I actually read, but I use the word read to mean “consumed” these books whether they entered my brain through my eye-holes or my ear-holes. Actually, one of the stats I look at is how many of these were audiobooks versus print or e-books.In 2016 I finished 24 books, so for 2017 I raised my goal to 30 books. Below is a collage of the covers of the 30 books I read in the order I read them.

As with my 2016 Challenge I tried to compile some stats just to see what they said about my reading habits and came up with some interesting things.

For starters more than half (53%) of the authors I read in 2017 were new to me. I like to think that’s a good thing that I am not sticking with just tried and true authors and branching out an discovering new voices. Of those 30 authors, I read 15 books were by male authors, 14 from female authors, and one from a non-binary author.

As for genre breakdown, 13 were Fantasy related, 13 were Science Fiction related, and the remaining 4 were non-fiction reads. Of the 4 non-fiction reads 2 were primarily biographies (Trevor Noah & Thomas Dolby), 1 was about the Cold War (Dead Man’s Hand), and 1 was about Parallel Worlds and astrophysics.

The majority of books were written in the past 2 decades while only one was written before I was born.

During 2017 I revisited a few old (book) friends. 5 out of 30 were books that I had read previously in one form or another. Namely, the Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series, Good Omens (Pratchett and Gaiman), and LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Several of the re-reads were for the purpose of introducing my kids to the stories.

16 of the 30 books were part of a series which is about the same ratio of books I read in 2016 that belonged to a series.

I won’t attempt to review all 30 of the books here. If you’re curious you can check out my Good Reads account to see how I rated the books or ask me for recommendations. I have already started working on my 2018 list so it will be ready to go EARLIER in 2019. My only issue with my current reading challenge for 2018 is that I upped my goal from 30 to 36 books and I have about 13 weeks remaining and about the same number of titles to get through. I am not a fast reader/listener and its going to be a challenge to make that target.

What have you been reading?