June: Mid-year Stats

Because I'm actually keeping a record of what I read this year I can actually do stats and check in on how I'm doing with my bookish goals for this year! For those of you who aren't bothered about or interested in stats, this will be a very boring post and I'm sorry. If you'd rather, I'm posting about craft stuff on Monday and fairytales on Friday with something else bookish in between, come back then!

This year so far I have started 63 books... and finished 45 of them! Really not a bad number for me all things considered though. Obviously I do not suffer from this problem with DNFing stuff that some bloggers seem to have!

Best Book by a Woman so far

Of the 45 I finished there are 30 different authors. I did a lot of Terry Pratchett reading just after he died. I also read a few volumes of the Scott Pilgrim books back in February for the re-readathon as well as things like Throne of Glass and its sequels and now I'm on a bit of a Scarlett Thomas binge prior to meeting her (eeeeeeeeeeeekkkk) in a couple of weeks so there's been a lot of reading the same authors which I'm totally ok with.

Best Book by a man so far

Let's start with the stat I'm proud of: 21 of my finished books so far have been by women and 24 by men so I'm pretty nearly 50/50! Honestly I'm surprised by the amount of books by men I've read - when people were talking about how they auto-read men without realising it at the beginning of the year I honestly thought I was the other way around. All of my favourite authors are women and I seem to buy a lot more books by women than men but apparently the men are getting in there somehow!

Best Book by a Diverse Author

My target at the beginning of the year was for one in three books I read to be by diverse authors which would mean I would have needed to have read 15 books by non - white or non British or American authors. I have finished 7 with another three (A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski) in progress. Suffice to say I suck at this, but at least I'm aware. The next few books I start will be from my shelves of diverse authors I think.

Best nonfiction book so far

The other goal I set myself was for one in four of the books I read to be nonfiction. In this I am much closer to succeeding! I should have read 11 and I have read 8 (with 2 in progress - one already mentioned plus Monkeys with Typewriters by Scarlett Thomas). I'm also really proud of the amount of nonfiction I've finished this year as starting it has never been my issue, it's always been that I get distracted midway and never finish which I have done a bit this year but nowhere near as much as in previous years!

Finally, 11 of my total of 45 have been graphic novels comprising three different series and a couple of standalones. So far in 2015 I've read:

* Fables: Witches, Rose Red, Super Team, Inherit the Wind by Bill Willingham
* Fairest: Wide Awake by Bill Willingham
* Saga: Volume 1, Saga: Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
* Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, Scott Pilgrim vs The World by Bryan Lee O'Malley
* Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
* Blankets by Craig Thompson



I can't choose one favourite for graphic novels. It's a tie between these two frickin awesome books everybody should be reading.

So that's the first half of 2015! Let's see if I can get some more diversity in there before the end!