Book Talk is an occassional feature where I talk about bookish things that aren’t book reviews.

2015 has been quite the year in books!  I’ve had my ups and downs this year as far as reading goes (more than any other year put together), and while I wish that 2015 ended on a better note reading wise, I’m hoping that 2016 will be a little bit better.

I had a reading slump earlier in the year- it was definitely stress-related to the point that I couldn’t focus on much of anything except sitting on the couch and watching t.v./Netflix.  It got better for a few months, but around mid-August, I found myself in a non-reading mood.  I tried manga and audio books from August to October, read only a handful of books in November (but I was also doing NaNoWriMo in November), so that might be why I didn’t read a lot in November.  And for December, I haven’t read a single book.  I would mark books as currently reading on goodreads, only to not even start them- and the one or two I did start, I only read a few pages and never continued past that.  I don’t want to force it, and I’ve kind of liked this non-reading period, but at the same time, I want to read so much.  Maybe I’ll try audio books again, to see if that will work, because picking something up is really unappealing right now.

Still, I actually managed to stick to my bookish goals this year- for the most part, I tried not to buy a lot of books, and I feel like I did pretty well with that.  Trying not to feel any bookish guilt- I don’t remember feeling guilty, but I also don’t think it was something that came up a lot.

As for reading more diversely (in terms of characters and authors), I did a lot better than I thought I would!  I think my initial goal was 2-4 books a month, and on average, I was at 5.8 books (or 43% of the books I read were diverse).  I was definitely more aware of what I was reading, and I read some amazing books this year because I wanted to read about more diverse characters and read books by diverse authors.  I could definitely do better, but overall, I did really well with it, and it’s something that I’m going to keep doing.

As for stats…I read a lot more print books than normal (52 this year, compared to the 7 I read last year), and that’s probably because I used the library a lot more this year (98 versus the one I read last year).  Audio books stayed around the same, but for the most part, where I got books and the format of said books stayed around the same, or evened out a little more.

I also kept better track of genre this year (because I’m also curious about what I read the most but am far too lazy to figure it out from Goodreads), and YA contemporary was my most read genre with 40 books. Paranormal (20), mystery/thriller/suspense (17), fantasy (16), manga (13), re-tellings (13), and dystopic novels (11) were the other genres I read the most.  Also, most of the books I read this year were published in 2012 or later.  My overall rating was 3.1 stars, and I read 147 books this year.  I didn’t include December in my stats, because I didn’t feel like it was fair to include a non-reading month in my own stats.

I could go on with some of the stats I kept track of (I read 37,375 pages and listened to 146 hours, 53 minutes of audio books), but I think I’ll just keep it to what I’ve mentioned (especially since I want to do the end-of-year survey hosted by The Perpetual Page-Turner, and I’m sure I’ll go more into some of this stuff then).

As for other bookish things, I went to a few book signings, and had a blast at them.  It would be fun to go up to the West Coast version of YALLFest next year (I know that there is one, I just found out about it after it happened), and while I don’t think I can make it up to BEA in 2016, I hope I can make it up there in 2017.

I’m hoping that my reading will get back to normal next year, and I can’t wait to read some awesome books!