2020 was an odd and terrible year in so many respects; we all know this already. With respect to reading, I thought early on that it was going to be a bust. Between a busy start to the year (preparing for a federal jury trial that ended up indefinitely postponed) and then the upending of everything that we all thought we knew, starting in March, it was weird and stressful and I spent a lot of the year staring at the wall or doomscrolling through my phone – not reading. Yet somehow in there I still managed to pile up the pages. There were weeks when I barely touched a book and weeks when I ripped through six books. And really no telling what the short-term reading future held – let alone the long-term. Here’s how it all shook out – get ready for a monster post:

Totals. According to Goodreads, I read 124 books in 2020, for a total of 31,363 pages. Actually pretty consistent with recent years. I always set a reading goal of 104 books – a pace of two per week – and in the past couple of years I’ve been exceeding that goal by about twenty books. So: right on the money.

Again according to Goodreads, the shortest book I read was Wonders and Absurdities 2019, Philip Rhys Evans’ commonplace selections for last year (I loaded it to Goodreads, so you’ll have to take my word for it that’s the title), which clocked in at a slim 24 pages. The longest book I read was The Pickwick Papers (which I reviewed for The Classics Club), a doorstopper at a whopping 944 pages.

Let’s break it down. I love this nerdy navel-gazing tradition of looking back over a year’s worth of reading. Here we go.

Pretty standard breakdown between fiction, non-fiction and poetry. A lot of bookish friends have reported reading more non-fiction than usual in 2020 – to the extent we’ve all been reading at all – but that doesn’t seem to hold true for me. This breakdown – majority fiction, but a healthy dose of non-fiction and a handful of poetry titles – is pretty much run-of-the-mill for me in any year.

Fiction genres this year contained some of the expected and some of the unexpected. Expected: I favored classics, which I always do, even more heavily than usual. Makes sense that in a year containing so much uncertainty, I was drawn to old favorites and new discoveries that have nonetheless stood the test of time. (Contributing to this was the fact that I moved mid-year and still have not gotten a library card in my new system – partly avoiding public places unless necessary, and partly because I’ve been enjoying reading from my own shelves, which are almost all classics.) Mysteries played a big role in my 2020 reading as well, which also makes sense in a stressful year; that neat resolution at the end of a cozy mystery sure is enticing. Unexpected: 20 sci-fi and fantasy titles! Whoa – that’s highly unusual for me. But I can explain that one too: it’s almost all Lumberjanes. Remember that binge over the summer? I knew that would skew my totals at the end of the year, and it did.

As for non-fiction genres, I think this was pretty predictable. Memoirs and books about books make up the lion’s share of my non-fiction reads this year, which is about standard for me. One parenting book: also standard, I tend to avoid those. There was less social science (which includes history) than usual, which also makes sense, in a year that was stressful enough as it is. The other thing that surprises me on this graph is: only four books about gardens and nature. I love nature writing as it is, and I moved to the exurbs this year, and it was a year for comfort reading – all of which should have meant a higher total. Wonder how 2021 will shake out in that respect.

Nothing too unusual in the format of the books I read. As always, it was almost all physical books. There was that comics binge over the summer, accounting for the larger total there, and the usual smattering of journals, ebooks, and a couple of audiobooks.

Here’s one that’s flipped on its head! Source of books was very unusual this year. I’m a self-proclaimed library junkie, and usually my yearly totals are overwhelmingly sourced from the library – this even though I have a carefully curated collection of books on my own shelves that I am really keen on reading. But this year, other than a handful that were borrowed from friends and sourced from the library, I read almost entirely from my own shelves. The reason for this was largely the pandemic. When everything shut down in mid-March, I had a short stack from the Alexandria library. I read my way through that, returned them, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t utilize the curbside pickup option – just felt like one more thing to figure out and I didn’t have the wherewithal. Then in June we moved houses – just one county over, but that meant a new library system, and again, figuring out the logistics of going and getting a library card in my new county, during a pandemic, just felt like too much. Plus by that point I was really enjoying my own shelves; it turns out I really like my own taste in books. Who knew?

Here’s one I’ve never tracked before – first-time reads versus re-reads. Given my past predilections for using the library, I think I probably read more first-time reads in past years, but I can’t confirm that since I don’t have the data. It will be interesting to track this in future years and see how it changes (or doesn’t).

Getting a little more into the weeds, when it came to authors’ sex or gender, I was weighted in favor of women as usual. There was a respectable minority of men and a handful of “various” – journals and short-story collections with both male and female contributors. Finally, five of the Lumberjanes trade paperbacks I read over the summer had an author who uses all gender pronouns; I have noted this as non-binary on my pie chart, although the author has noted that they are not using a particular gender label at this time. Hopefully I’ll read more gender non-binary authors in 2021.

One last graph. Setting was pretty standard for me this year – majority Great Britain (of those, two books set in Scotland and the rest in England) and USA. A handful of books set in continental Europe, one each in Asia and Canada – none entirely in Africa, I must do better in 2021, although one of the “various” category was set in a few locations between Africa, the Middle East, and continental Europe – and a bunch in either fictional worlds or in multiple settings (none of which were really dominant). I’m giving myself a pass on diversity of settings in 2020. It was a stressful year; I just wanted to close my eyes and think of England, apparently.

Whew! This one is always a behemoth, but fun to write. It was a terrible year in many respects, but actually rather a good one for reading – at least for me. Next year, I predict more of the same, on the book front at least. More reading from my own shelves (I’ll probably hold off on that library card until COVID numbers in my area go down substantially and I feel more comfortable going out to public places). More comfort reading – more classics, more mysteries, more nature, more re-reads. More England, certainly.

How was your 2020 in books?