2021 Year in Books.

Hey!

It is time to look back on my reading throughout 2021! This post will give updates on my Goodreads challenge, some pie charts of what I read, and a recap on if I did good with my 2021 reading goals that I made at the start of the year. I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty big struggle with reading this past year. My head was just not in it. Too many other things going on and I couldn’t find a balance or any motivation for much of anything. At one point I wasn’t even sure if I would complete my Goodreads challenge. Did I manage to do it?

My Goodreads reading challenge was to read 50 books in 2021…

61 books read for challenge.
36 of those were audiobooks.
1 was a DNF that isn’t counted toward my goal above.

I read 10 books more than I did in 2020! In 2020 I barely reached my Goodreads challenge, so I was happy that I passed it by 11 books this year. Of course I hoped I would have read more like I have in other years, but the last few years have just been really hard on me as far as finding the motivation to read like I used to. Once again saved by the audibooks this year!

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I don’t do half star ratings and I use Goodreads’ rating system with how I rate the books that I read. Below is how Goodreads has their star ratings set up.

5 stars – it was amazing
4 stars – I really liked it
3 stars – liked it
2 stars – it was ok
1 star – did not like it

Below is a pie chart of my star ratings of the books that I read in 2021.

I had more 5-star reads in 2021 than I did the year before (2020 I only had seven), but five of those 5-stars were rereads. The 4-stars and 3-stars were pretty consistent between 2020 and 2021. I had more 2-stars this year than I did last year. The 1-star was the same as 2020 and I had less DNF books than I did in 2020. Honestly, my numbers stay pretty consistent throughout everything give or take a few each year. If you want to check out what my 2020 numbers were, you can check it out over here.

You can check out more about all the books that I read in 2021 over here with links to reviews if I did one. I will be doing a series of blog posts coming soon of all the books that I read in 2021 with their star ratings, links to their Goodreads pages, and covers. My first post will be all the five star books of the year and so on. I did it in previous years and decided to continue with those posts, because it’s always fun to look back on the books that I read and share what I loved and maybe didn’t love so much.

And just for fun, here are a couple more random pie charts for the books that I read in 2021. The first pie chart shows the format of the books that I read whether they were ARCs, e-books, print, or audiobooks. It seems this year it was all about the audiobooks. It also looks like I choose reading e-books a little more over print books as well.

The second pie chart shows whether it was an older book that I own, a newer book that I purchased in 2021, or a book that I borrowed. I wanted to get an idea of how much I actually borrow from the library and Kindle Unlimited versus what I actually own. It seems a little even between books I own and books I borrow, but books I own beat out the books I borrow by like four books. I am glad to see that I read a few more older books than I did recent purchases too. I am hoping to see a lot less in borrowed books in 2022 and focus more on my own books.

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Now onto my 2021 reading goals and whether I think I accomplished them or not. You can check out the actual post I made in January 2021 of my goals over here, but here is just a small recap of what they were. That post has longer explanations of what each of these goals were.

2021 Goodreads Challenge.
As you can see at the start of this post, I was able to complete my Goodreads challenge of 50 books. I actually read 61 books. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without audiobooks though. As you can see from my pie chart above, audiobooks were a big number of the books that I read. I just couldn’t really focus much on reading this year, so it was a lot easier to put on an audiobook while I read or worked on diamond paintings.

ARCs/no ARCs.
This goal was about not requesting too many ARCs and focus on the ARCs that I didn’t finish the year before. I ended up requesting six ARCs and sadly I only read one of them. I also never did get to read one of the ARCs that I received in 2020 that I had hoped to read. I’m sad about this, BUT you’ll see this as a repeat goal for 2022 because I want to get all of these ARCs read and I want to actually try to stay away from them as much as possibly this year.

2017 or older TBR jar. 
Complete fail with my goal of reading one TBR jar pick a month of my books from 2017 or older. I abandoned this goal after the first month. I just wasn’t in the mood for any of the books that I chose and I didn’t want to force myself to read them, so I decided not to even bother with this one anymore.

Read 15 of my own books.
YES! I was able to complete this goal and actually read 18 of my older books as you can see in one of my pie charts above. This goal was a little similar with the TBR jar because both focused on reading my older books. The difference was my TBR jar was for 2017 books and older, this goal counted any book I bought before 2021.

Write more reviews.
Nope. I think I only ever got around to writing five reviews.

Focus more on my blog and new content. 
Again, nope for this one too. I think I started strong the first month or so, but then after awhile I just got so stuck in my head with other things and busy with work that I just didn’t have enough focus on my blog or coming up with new content for it.

I hope to be around more in 2021!
This one was a let down as well. I did try to blog hop as much as I could, but I know I could have done better. My mind was just not on blogging in 2021. Too much happening in my life and in my head that it was hard to want to be around. I did try to do it at least once a month though. Hopefully that counts for something.

How did you do this year with your reading goals? How many books did you read in 2021? Feel free to link me to your posts!

I did some blog hopping yesterday and it was fun catching up with your posts. Hopefully I can find a balance between life and blogging, so I can be around more. I bought a cool new planner to use for this year, so maybe I can use that to schedule in some blogging time each week. I’ll have my 2022 reading goals posted in the next few days, so be on the look out for that. 🙂 I also have a few other posts that I want to start working on this weekend.

In case you missed it;
Wrap Up|| December.
Book Haul|| December.

I hope you have a great day!