My Year in Books: 2017 Edition!

Hey everyone!  Well, 2017 is finally over and now it's time to wrap up the year with my reading stats of the year!  Even though I haven't met my original year goal, which was to read over 80 books, I've still managed to read a lot of great books this year and I'll share the results by using the graphs over at NCES Kids' Zone website to show you how my year in reading went!

Books Read in 2017:

Types of Books I've Read:

The most books I've read this year was of course Children's Books!  I have always loved reading children's books and this year was definitely no exception!  In second place, we have graphic novels which is another set of books that I have always enjoyed reading. I guess I keep on getting such high numbers on both children's books and graphic novels because they are the quickest to read through.  Next, my numbers in the Young Adult and Adult Reads have gone up this year, with me reading over 11 books in total, which is a huge step up for me in terms of reading chapter books for the year. I hope to beat that number next year!

ARC Reads:

NetGalley Books get the highest number this year since it was the first set of ARC books that I had signed up for and there were many good reads coming out of NetGalley this year!  Second place is of course the various ARCs I got from authors, which is quite an honor to have so many authors come to me to review their books!  Lastly, there is Edelweiss, which I had just signed up for during the second half of the year and hopefully, I'll start reading more books from Edelweiss soon!

Book Ratings:

Wow!  Lots of 5 star reads this year, which is fantastic!  That means that I've been reading a lot of fantastic books this year and I hope that next year, I read even more great books!  Next up is 4.5 stars and 4 stars reads which I also read a lot of those books this year.  I rarely read any bad books this year, with the lowest number being 3.5 stars.  I am a bit disappointed that I only read a few books for the 5.5 star ratings books when previous years, I had managed to read books that were over 6 stars.

Male and Female Authors:

I'm surprised with the Male and Female Author numbers this year.  When I first did the mid year reading stats, the male and female author ratio was pretty even at the time.  Now, the numbers show that I have read more books by Male Authors than I did with Female Authors.  Maybe it's because I had read a lot of graphic novels that were written by male authors and I do tend to read a ton of graphic novels each year.

Series and Stand Alone Books:

Wow!  The Series and Stand Alone books were quite close this year!  Of course, I've read more Series books than I did for Stand Alone books (since almost every book is apart of a series at this point) and I still have a lot of book series to catch up on!

First Book Read: Alice by Christina Henry

Last Book Read: Gregory and the Grimbockle by Melanie Schubert

Total Books Read in 2017:

65

What the Statistics Are Telling Me:

* Even though I still have read mostly children's books and graphic novels this year, I'm so happy to see that my numbers in both young adult and adult books has risen up this year!  I guess it's because I've been reading one adult or young adult novel per month and that has been really helping me in getting my numbers in novels up.

* I still haven't reached up to 80% on NetGalley yet, but I'm slowly reaching a higher ratio on NetGalley than I had before.  I'm slowly reading through the books that has been on my TBR shelf for awhile and my ratio has risen up to 60%, which leaves only 20% more to reach that magic goal of 80%!

Things to Improve On:

* I'm going to try to reach the NetGalley goal of 80%, even though I'm slowly making progress on that.  I also still need to go through all my ARCs that I had received from the past year, since I have a huge pile of ARCs that I still need to read through.  I also still need to read the Reading Alley book "Immortal Flame" since I had that book on my shelf for over a year now.

* I'm slowly making progress with my young adult and adult books, even though I want to reach up to about 20 books for the young adult and adult books for 2018.  If I continue to read at least one young adult and adult book per month, I might be able to make that goal soon enough.

* At first, I was thinking about not doing anymore TBR lists since I thought that it was distracting me from reading the books I need to read.  However, I have decided to go back to doing TBR lists after seeing so many books ending up on my TBR list.  So, I will try my best to read the books on my TBR list each month and see how that goes.

* I'm definitely going to make it my goal to read over 80 books this year.  The reason why I wasn't able to last year was because I had a bit of a hiccup in November where I only read one book for the month.  So, hopefully I'll be able to read up to at least 10 books a month, which has been a long running goal for me for awhile now.

* I still failed to read any classics last year and I'm still sticking to my goal about reading 5 classics for this year.

* I'm going to try to complete at least 5 reading challenges this year, since completing reading challenges has always been a hard thing for me to do, but it helps raise up my reading stats a lot.

* I'm really loving the improvements I've made to my blog, especially with how I'm doing the monthly reading wrap ups and using graphs and Excel to keep track of my reading progress. I will definitely continue this process in the near future!