2022 Goodreads Choice Awards reading challenge recap

After reading all the great books from last year's Goodreads Choice Awards reading challenge, I decided to do it again. My goal was to read at least two books a month from the list of 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards finalists, for a total of 24. I ended up reading 28.

The books I read were (in alphabetical order by title):

• The Anthropocene Reviewed - John Green
• Apples Never Fall - Liane Moriarty
  
• Appleseed - Matt Bell
• Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
  
• Bewilderment - Richard Powers
  
• The Book of Accidents - Chuck Wendig
  
• Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr
• Come With Me - Ronald Malfi
  
• The Cousins - Karen McManus
• Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner 
• The Final Girl Support Group - Grady Hendrix 
  
• Golden Girl - Elin Hilderbrand
• The Good Sister - Sally Hepworth
• The Hawthorne Legacy - Jennifer Lynn Barnes
• Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao 
• The Last House on Needless Street - Catriona Ward
• The Last Thing He Told Me - Laura Dave
• Local Woman Missing - Mary Kubica 
• The Lost Apothecary - Sarah Penner  
• Malibu Rising - Taylor Jenkins Reid 
• My Heart is a Chainsaw - Stephen Graham Jones
• The Night She Disappeared - Lisa Jewell
  
• The Push - Ashley Audrain
• Rock Paper Scissors - Alice Feeney
• The Rose Code - Kate Quinn 
• The Sentence - Louise Erdrich
  
• A Slow Fire Burning - Paula Hawkins 
• Under the Whispering Door - T.J. Klune

Of the 28 books, I rated 11 as 5 stars, 8 as four stars, and 9 as three stars. The average rating came out to be 4.07, which is higher than my overall average of about 4.0 stars for the books I read outside the challenge. However, it wasn't as high as the 4.11 average from last year's Goodreads Choice Awards finalists. Still, this was a great way to read books that I wound up liking.

I made two observations from last year that held true again this year. The category winners didn't perform as well as the other finalists, and there were more 5-star and 3-star ratings than 4-star ratings. This seems to just be how the list of finalists work for me. 

A new observation this year is the shift in genres I read. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've found that I read more thrillers in 2022. This was reflected in the reading challenge since eight of the 28 books were part of the Mystery & Thriller category.