November Reading Wrap Up: The Stats

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We are full on into the swing of the winter season over here. I have the 24 books of Christmas to begin wrapping tomorrow, he Christmas tree will be going up next week, and yesterday it dumped a nice blanket of snow 5" deep. I guess, since it's after Thanksgiving, that I will accept that...though I'm not entirely thrilled with its arrival.

I had a pretty decent November. It wasn't as impressive as my October reading, but that's somewhat to be expected. As we get closer to the holidays, my schedule seems to be getting more full. Thank goodness for audiobooks!

Let's take a look at how I did in November...

Reading Stats

In the month of November, I finished a total of 12 books. I do have to admit though, the numbers would not have looked so good if not for two things: audiobooks and Believathon. The majority of books I finished during the month were middle grade reads, which I primarily listened to, for the Believe in the Impossible Read-a-Thon (aka Believathon) hosted by Gavin Hetherington. This was such a fun month and I really enjoyed reading some childhood favorites and some children's classics that I had never managed to read in my youth.

I officially passed the 100 mark this month and I'm really happy about that. However, after considering the fact that my Book of the Year Bracket Challenge uses a 16-base bracket, I'll have to set my reading goal next year for 128 in order to give myself a nice even bracket. I do like nice and tidy stats.

With a lot of middle grade reads, it should come as no surprise that the average book length was somewhat shorter than usual. Because of this, the total pages I read this month is admittedly less than it would otherwise be. But I still managed to top 3,000 pages for the month. Not too shabby and on par for the majority of the year.

This is where you can see that I did have a little rougher time reading this month than I have the majority of the year. It just seemed that I didn't have as much energy at the ends of my days to get a lot of reading in. I will admit that some of this struggle was due to one of the physical books I read. It was a bit denser and more of a slow burn than my typical read, so it took me 13 days to read, more than double the usual time for a physical book.

The pages continue to accumulate, regardless of the pace at which I plod along. I should be able to top 35,000 pages for the year if things stay on track for December.


TBR Completion

Last month's TBR consisted of a selection of 13 print novels and 11 audiobooks, for a total of 24 potential reads. I managed to only read half of that amount. The majority of the slacking was in print reads. As mentioned, I had one book that slowed the pace substantially and probably prevented me from finishing an additional 2-3 books. Hopefully I am now back on track with my upcoming reads. A 50% completion rate is not awesome.

When it comes to the print selections, I completed a mere 4 out of my goal of 13. This gave me a completion rate of 30.8%. For audiobooks, I completed 8 books, but only 7 of them were on the original TBR. This gives me an audio completion rate of 63.6%, which is a much better number and somewhat buffered my disastrous print reading.

I have devised a way to track this particular stat for next year (which I'm sure thrills me more than the average person), so come January's wrap up there will be graphs. Yay!


Book Stats

I managed a pretty high rating average for the month. The middle grades were fantastic for helping this along and the majority of my print reads were good as well. This gave me the second highest average rating for the year, at 4.21.

In the pile or reads there were: 1 novella, 4 ARCS, 5 middle grade classics, and 2 from a middle grade series. Like I said, if it wasn't for my middle grade books, this would have been a pretty sad looking month.

In that group, the ratings were as follows:

DNF : 0 books          1-star: 0 books          1.5 star: 0 books

2-star: 0 books          2.5 star: 1 book          3-star: 0 books          3.5 star: 0 books

4-star: 5 books          4.5 star: 4 books          5 star: 2 books

SUCH a good reading month in terms of ratings. Thank goodness for good books!

There were:

4 Historical Fictions (1 of which was a Classic as well)
4 Fantasy reads
4 Classics
1 Contemporary

The 5-star reads were both Middle Grade classics, with one of them being a reread.

Seven of the books were middle grade reads, 1 was Young Adult, and the remaining 4 were for adult audiences.

Books I Read

For months where I read more than six books (which I honestly expect to be all months from here forward, I will be splitting my wrap up into two pieces. The first half will be the stats and the second half will be mini-reviews of the individual books read. This will help manage the length of posts and should also reduce the strain on my sanity.

That being said, here are the books I read last month, along with their individual genres and ratings:

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman (Contemporary): 4 stars
Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris (Historical Fiction): 4.5 stars

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (Middle Grade Classic/Adventure): 4 stars

Gravemaidens by Kelly Coon (YA Fantasy): 4 stars

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (MG Classic): 5 stars

The BFG by Roald Dahl (MG Classic/Fantasy): 4 stars

The Vine Witch by Luanne G. Smith (Fantasy/Paranormal): 4.5 stars

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (MG Classic/Historical Fiction): 5 stars

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (MG Fantasy): 4.5 stars

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (MG Classic): 4 stars

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (MG Fantasy): 4.5 stars

Swede Hollow by Ola Larsmo (Historical Fiction): 2.5 stars

Did you take part in Believathon? I had a fantastic time and will be making middle grade reading a regular part of my TBR. It's just so much darned fun.