What I read in 2020

2020 has certainly been a unique year. Who would've thought at the beginning of the year that we'd spend more time at home than we ever wanted to? If there's one silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it's been that I had more time to read. In 2020, I exceeded my original reading goal of 80 books by reading 99. Yes, I was that close to reading 100 books this year! The 99 books were also 15 more than the 84 I read in 2019.

The average rating for the books I read this year was 3.96 stars per book, broken down as follows:

• 5 stars - 30 books
• 4 stars - 35 books 
• 3 stars - 34 books 

The 3.96 stars average was a slight decrease from 4.01 stars in 2019.

This year, I had two reading goals. In January, I embarked on the NY Times Bestseller Challenge in the hopes of discovering some great new authors. It didn't quite work out that way, as I mentioned here. The average rating of the books I read for the NY Times Bestseller Challenge was only 3.5.

I started my second reading goal in the middle of the year, which was to read as many of the most popular mystery books of the past five years as I could. My average rating for the mysteries was 4.1, which helped boost my overall star rating for the year, but it wasn't quite enough to counteract the lower ratings from the bestsellers.

In my next post, I’ll reveal my top ten favorite books of 2020. Stay tuned!

2020 reading goals recap

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.

2020 holiday sale

2020 has been a dreadful year, but what better way to end it than with a book sale? Between now and the New Year, almost all of my e-books will be on sale for 99 cents or FREE on Amazon! Get these titles before prices go back up!

99 CENTS:

Beneath the Earth		All That Remains of Me		Beyond New Eden		Gifted

Transmissions		In the Hands of Children		Keep Your Enemies Close		George and the Galactic Games

A House in the Woods		Protect		Search		Rescue

FREE:

Drive*		Through a Tangled Wood		Celestial		Spectral Tales

Happy holidays, and happy reading!

* If you find that "Drive" isn't free on Amazon, you can download it for free from Smashwords.

NaNoWriMo 2020 recap

After taking a year off from the challenge, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again this year. Instead of trying to write 50,000 words in November, I set a more realistic goal of 15,000, which meant an average of 500 words per day. I'm happy to say that I reached my goal... and then some! I finished the month with 20,037 words.

November started off strong for me. After the first ten days, I was on pace for over 20,000 words, but then a mid-month slump set me back. While 15,000 still looked achievable two-thirds of the way through, I didn't know if I could get to 20,000 anymore. Fortunately, with the Thanksgiving holidays and an extra two days off from work, I made a final push during the last Thursday through Sunday to get across the 20,000-word line.

All in all, I'm pleased with how NaNoWriMo went this year. Not only did I surpass my goal of 15,000 words, but more importantly, I've made great progress on my WIP. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, there's a good chance that I can finish the first draft by the end of the year! That is more important to me than any monthly word count goal.