Stats & Such | 2nd Quarter of 2023

Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog! 

It's time for another stats update! Quarter 2 of the year has come and gone, so let's look at my reading from the past three months, shall we? 

Some information first: in the months of April to June, I read 46 books. If you'll recall from my Quarter 1 stats, that's 13 more books that I read this quarter. This is entirely due to the binge-read of Yona of the Dawn that I did in April, actually. I think that's rather amusing. If you take out the Yona manga, that's still on average 10-11 books per month, so I'm right on track. 

One more thing: In this quarterly (and for the upcoming quarterlies) I'll only be able to show you charts and graphs from the CAWPILE spreadsheet. This is because I'm unable to isolate a section of the year in Storygraph, so I can only see stats from the entire year. It's a little frustrating, but I'll try to make up for it.

Okay, let's get into the stats!

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Format

First, let's look at the method by which I read the past 46 books.

Once again, the numbers aren't included on the chart so you'll just have to take my word for it. This quarter I read predominantly physically, with 31 books in this section. Next was with my iPad, with 10 books, then 3 mixed media (this is when I physically read a book along with the audiobook), and finally I listened to 1 audiobook on it's own. I'm not sure if I'll read any more audiobooks this year, this was only because the e-book was not in my library's database and I was on a deadline. I don't love listening to audiobooks without having the words with me, because I get distracted too easily and tend to not retain what's happening in the story. 

Now let's look at the format of the books that I read. 

Novels and manga seem to be duking it out, don't they? This quarter I read 21 novels (I know it says 22 on the chart, but this is including a book I've already read in July, so I'm leaving that out of the final number) and 18 manga volumes, along with a handful of other types of books: 3 novellas, 2 graphic novels, and 1 short-story collection and poetry collection, respectively. 

Genre and Age Range

Alright, now let's go a little further in depth. I want you to remember that the CAWPILE spreadsheet is edited by me, so the genres are what I believe the books to be. There is also a secondary genre section on the spreadsheet, but there isn't a chart for that since there are too many variables. 

Once again, there will be some overlap between the "Format" chart and this "Genre" chart. Manga dominates as usual with 16 books (thank you, Yona of the Dawn) and fantasy is not that far behind with 10 books. Then horror with 4 books (hooray, I finally read some horror!) followed by contemporary fiction, historical fiction, and mythology retellings with 3 books each. I read 2 paranormal books this past quarter, and finally 1 of each of the following: poetry, classics, short-story collections, and literary fiction (that's the bright green slice that doesn't have a label). 

I've once again failed at one of my goals for the year: I only read 1 classic this past quarter. Shame on me! I also failed to read a single translated book in the month of May, which is another goal failed. And the cherry on top: no nonfiction read this past quarter. So I failed every one of my goals in quarter 2. Oops. 

Well, nobody's perfect, I guess. 

Now let's look at the age range. 

It looks like a tie between adult and YA, that's so fun! I read 21 books of each, along with 3 middle-grade books. Another small reminder that the majority of the YA books I read this quarter were manga, so factoring out those, I actually only read a grand total of 5 YA novels. That makes me giggle. I really am phasing out of reading YA. 

Publication Year

One thing I wanted to add to this quarterly is what year the books I'm reading were published. Specifically I want to look at how many books were published this year or last year, vs. backlist titles.

Obviously the majority of books read this year have been backlist titles, there's really no point in separating each year. However I can't actually do that with the charts that are on the CAWPILE spreadsheet, so you get this mess. Just ignore all of the little sections to the best of your ability, if you can. The main thing I wanted to focus on were 2023 and 2022 releases: it looks like in this quarter I've read 12 books that were published this year, and 5 books that were published last year. All of the others are considered backlist, which add up to 29 books. 

Star Rating

Finally, let's look at the star ratings for the past three months. First I'll do whole stars, and then I'll add in .5 stars. 

Remember that I don't rate manga, so the total number of star ratings isn't 46, but instead is 28. 

Doing some quick math, my average CAWPILE score for the past quarter is 6.87, which comes out to 3.5 stars. That makes sense since the biggest pie slice is for a 3.5 star rating, at 8 books. I also want to point out that 3 of the 6 5-star ratings were from rereads, so that improves my average score and star rating, but I'm unable to remove those from the stats. I'm not tech savvy enough for that. 

At least I haven't had any 1 star reads yet this year. I'd hate to end that streak. 

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Alright, that's it for this quarterly! I hope that I explained everything enough. Honestly I'm a little delirious from hunger right now so all I can really think about is food. 

Until next time!