What I Read: 2016 in Review

I realize we're well into February of 2017 right now, which makes this 2016 reading summary post a little late, but better late than never! I actually had it ready to go for a month, but this is the first Wednesday of the new year where I don't have any book reviews to go up.

 First of all, something weird happened since I grabbed this screenshot and today: the number of pages in Empire of Storms jumped from 693 to 701. What? What's going on with that?

Compared to 2015, I read more books and more pages, so probably more reading overall. Much like 2015, I hated the most popular book on my reading list (2016: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, 2015: The Fault in Our Stars) with a fiery passion. This is not to be confused with the highest-rated book I read, which is not pictured in this screen shot. In 2016 it was Queen of Shadows; in 2015 it was The Martian. And while I liked Queen of Shadows well enough, I thought The Martian was largely a crappy, overrated excuse for SF.

Lesson? I will continue to dislike around 75% of popular things! But even so, my average rating crept up from a 3.2 in 2015 to a generous 3.4 in 2016. Maybe turning 30 made me go soft?

Much like 2015, the least popular book I read in 2016 was in Swedish. This year it was a collection of essays, rather than a collection of flash fiction.

I smashed my GoodReads goal in 2016 (much like I did in 2015). Hopefully I will smash this year's goal (48) as well. Some book bloggers and BookTubers (haha, BookTubers, like y'all are potatoes or something!) read what I can only describe as a ridiculous amount of books per year. I think some of that is attributable to different tastes (you see Empire of Storms up there, but Throne of Glass is basically my only concession to YA or New Adult or whatever the marketing term du jour is), and part of is that I sometimes make an effort to read in Swedish (which slows me down), but if I'm being honest, some of it is definitely that I am a slacker. Ideally I'd like to shoot for 4 books a month (this year's GoodReads challenge), which is still no great shakes compared to what some other readers out there get through—even the ones who read heavier lifting than YA.

So far I'm doing okay on my 2017 GoodReads challenge, but only because I binged on Saga. I am here for comics and graphic novels, especially ones that opt to be anything-but-superhero, but I won't pretend that they're much quicker reading than regular books. Yeah, I sat and read three Saga trade paperbacks, so that counts as three books, but it didn't take me as long as it would to read three traditional novels. The novel my book club picked for February looks really interesting and it's available on the Internet Archive. Plus, it's short, so I have plenty of time to catch up with everyone else who has a head start!

How'd you do on your 2016 reading goals? You crush it or what? Let's talk books!