That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2020 Edition

So as they do every year, the algorithm elves over at Goodreads have prepared an annual review of the books their users read and rated in 2020. Being a year when there was, shall we say, not a lot in the way of places to go or things to do, plus one in which I managed not to end up in the ICU for a while, one might think I would have read quite a bit more than in 2019, but in fact, I only read about 200 more pages. Maybe I was spending too much time watching the news …

Before we get to the actual reading report for 2020, here are a few stray observations about it, because, you know, I have to pad these posts out with words and stuff.

• Despite reading 200 more pages, I read eight fewer books. This may* have something to do with the two months I spent on the thousand-page Infinite Jest, not to mention the three books it took for me to finally finish “The Mongoliad“, which added up to about twelve hundred pages.
  • This is also reflected in the fact that my average book length in 2020 was 400 pages, vs. 335 pages in 2019.
• My average rating inched up a bit from 2019, to 3.0 stars from 2.7 stars. This is quite possibly also a side effect of reading fewer books this year.
• Although Death’s End was the book I read with the highest rating on Goodreads, I would say the middle book in that trilogy, The Dark Forest, is the best one. (It is only behind Death’s End by 0.01 points, so …)
• My own novel that I finished and published this year, Father’s Books, isn’t on this report, even though I did, technically, read it.
• This year I used a browser extension that takes a screen shot of an entire page, chomping through it Pac-Man-style, rather than the method I’ve used in previous years of manually taking a screen shot, scrolling down, taking another screen shot, scrolling down some more, and then assembling the pieces in a photo editing program. Automation!

And now, without further yada-yada, here’s the report. Get ready to do some scrolling!

_{^* Ya think???}