My Reading Year 2009

by Sarah on January 6, 2010 · 7 comments

2009 was an excellent reading year for me. I discovered several great new-to-me authors and devoured their backlists. I also branched out and tried a few new genres and subgenres, including urban fantasy, fantasy, erotic romance and inspirational romance.

I thought 2009 was a pretty good year for new releases, although I noticed I bought and read fewer historical romances than I have since I began reading romance in the mid-1990s.

Out of the 132 books I read this year, 56 were published in 2009. My reading average was up from 2008 when I only read 110 books, 35 of which were published that year.

91 out of 132 books (69%) received a B- or higher.  Given that I consider anything from a B Minus upwards to be a satisfactory read, that’s an unprecedented result. Buying books on the basis of reviews and recommendations from people whose opinions I trust is clearly the way to go.

Here’s a breakdown of my grades over the past two years:

Grade

 2008 2009
A 2 8
A- 8 13
B+ 12 28
B 19 19
B- 27 23
C+ 17 22
C 10 11
C- 6 1
D 3 1
F 0 1
DNF 6 5
Total: 110

132

I awarded an amazing 21 A/A- grades in 2009. Many of these books were not published in 2009 and therefore not eligible for my ‘Best of’ list.

The genres in which I read the most books were contemporary romance with 25 books and historical romance with 21. I also read 13 romantic suspense books and 12 urban fantasy, a new-to-me genre. This is a definite change from 2008 when my favourite genre by far was historical romance, followed by YA and historical mystery.

With an ever-increasing list of books I’m looking forward to this year, 2010 promises to be a fun reading year. Interestingly, I only have a few historical romances on that list. It seems my former favourite genre is slipping further in my affections, mostly due to my reluctance to read yet another romance set in 19th Century England. I’m curious to see which genre I’ll favour by the end of the year.

Was 2009 a good reading year for you?

Tagged as: Reading, Reading Year 2009

{ 7 comments }

Keira Soleore January 6, 2010 at 14:08

Enjoyed reading your analysis. Feeds the now-undergood engineering part of me. How did you generate your charts?

Sarah January 6, 2010 at 16:36

@Keira Soleore: I created both the table and the pie charts in the same Word document in which I wrote the text. When it came to copying and pasting the post into WordPress, I saw that the pie charts were missing. I got around that by copying and pasting them into FastStone Image Viewer and saving them as .gif. Then I uploaded them to my blog as graphics and placed them in my post. That’s probably why the pie charts are nicely aligned and the table is not! I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to create charts in blog posts but this worked for me.

katiebabs January 6, 2010 at 17:07

Such nice looking charts! On average, the books you read were in the B grade range. So, double your reading for 2010? ;)

Sarah January 6, 2010 at 18:04

@katiebabs: Oh, I wish! I had hoped to hit the 150 mark in 2009, but maybe I’ll manage it this year.

Victoria Janssen January 6, 2010 at 21:06

Wow, CHARTS.

Also, it was interesting reading, but…CHARTS!

heidenkind January 7, 2010 at 01:14

Holy cow, you used math and stuff! That’s an awful lot of A and B books; you really did have a good year.

My year was totally blah. :(

Sarah January 7, 2010 at 15:37

@Victoria Janssen: @heidenkind: If you want to see much more impressive charts than mine, check out Jill’s post at Romance Rookie: http://romancerookie.blogspot.com/2010/01/2009-year-in-review.html#comments

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