2016’s rainbow of charts ;)

I’ve been gathering myself to write this final 2016 summary post and it looks like it’s not getting easier and half of January had gone by, so I feel like I should just sit my ass in front of the keyboard and do it!… right after I’ll get another cup of coffee.

My top genres

Let’s start with an easy and colorful one – the Genres. Some of these overlap and my list was way longer, but I’ve decided to cut it and leave only 7+ books per genre here:

It looks like I’m still faithful to Fantasy because it’s awesome! I was surprised by the amount of sci-fi stories I’ve read last year as I prefer watching rather than reading SF, but it mostly ended up well, so I’m happy about it. And one more comment for the Romance section – none of the books I’ve read were really a pure romance, but I like adding this category to books with a strong romantic subplot.

And here are some of my favorite reads from top 5 genres:

 

The format

OK, as much I’m happy with reading in pretty much all possible formats I can think of, I would prefer if the Paper books took over the ebooks this year. It was fun, but my books are getting dusty and I intend to hug them a bit this year.

And here are 6 books, one per format, that I’d love to give a shout-out:

 

About the series

And another thing I should really work on – can you see how many first parts I’ve read this year? That’s horrible! Well, I liked some of them and I even loved a few, but that’s even worse since this made my to-continue list even longer!

I do like the 25% of standalone novels up there. It felt good to read something without worrying if there will be a cliffhanger, or maybe another super-long series to continue, although some of these books really should have a continuation because they were awesome :D.

And another shout-out:

 

Time and setting

Considering the amount of Fantasy books I’ve read the Time of Action chart looks kind of weird. I usually assign the “past” to all the books that seem like they don’t have any modern technology, so… that’s a lot of them.

At least the “future” setting seems appropriate.

One of my goals for 2016 was to visit as many countries in books as I could, but it looks I’m not very good at book-travels ;). I managed to visit 12 countries, but there were also other interesting settings on my list, for example, I visited Mars three times :D. I wonder where will I travel this year.

It’s a gender thing

I’m honestly surprised by the equal ratio of male-female characters. I didn’t really think about that before, but I never suspected it would end up like that. I don’t mind reading about characters of either genre, so I usually don’t really care either but I find it easier to identify with females (for obvious reasons) and easier to see the character getting all beat up when it’s a male (Dresden…).

And the other thing that’s a bit surprising is that apparently, I read more books by male authors. Here I would thought it otherwise, but again – I don’t mind either way :).

Aww, the “other” gender still makes me smile :D. I guess a bit of explanation might be at a place here? There were like three stories in which characters genre was either completely undetermined or explained as “we have none”.

And again there’s a seemingly huge gap between new and known to me authors, but with the number of new series/books I’ve read that was kind of predictable. I actually thought it would be even bigger, so maybe it’s fine as it is.

I would track the indie/non-indie authors ratio too, but I’ve lost track which is which. As long as the books I’ve read was good it doesn’t matter to me if it was published by a huge company, self-published or got to me any other way. I’ll do my best to get the news of it to you, so more people could enjoy a good book :).

The ratings

And to end it up with a little curve let me show you what ratings I gave to the books I’ve read. I have a feeling I should be firmer with the fives. We shall see.