I had two reading goals in 2020. I started off the year by wanting to read at least one NY Times Bestseller each month by an author who was new to me. In June, I added another goal to read as many books as I could on the Goodreads list of most popular mysteries of the past five years. It's time to see how each of those went.
I managed to reach my NY Times Bestseller goal despite not loving several of the books I read. Of the twelve books on the list, I only rated one of them as 5 stars. Four books were 4-star reads for me, and the remaining seven were rated 3 stars. The average rating of the NY Times bestsellers was 3.5.
In addition to being constrained by reading only authors who were new to me, another problem I ran into with the reading challenge was that the selection wasn't as broad as I expected. Two books, Where the Crawdads Sing (my only 5-star bestseller) and Little Fires Everywhere, dominated the charts. I didn't keep track of how many weeks they spent at the top of the bestseller lists, but my impression was that it was a lot.
On the mystery front, my experience was better. I read ten books on the Goodreads list since June. Three of them were 5-star reads, five received 4 stars, and only two were rated as 3 stars, for an average rating of 4.1. The mysteries were more entertaining than the bestsellers, and it helped that I was able to read books from authors I was already familiar with, although half of the books from this challenge were by authors new to me.
In my next post, I'll give a recap of all the books I read this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment