SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Don't worry, you still have a month to go! But I wanted to say something, so I decided to start this thread instead of trying to decide where to put my comment.

See your own Goodreads stats here: 2021 Year in Books

I looked at mine for the first time in a while, and I feel like there's always something at the top that I wish wasn't there. Sigh. Last (?) year it was the shortest book, now it's the longest. Do I really need to read a 900 page book just so that I don't have that stat forever staring at me on my YiB page? I do have a book that would do, but I don't know if I'm in the mood to read it now.

Funniest stat is definitely the least popular book, which is Short Stories About Kittens :D

But the thing I really wanted to talk about is the vague goal I sort of publicly set myself in January. I said I wanted to read less than 50% US authors, and at least 10% translated fiction. I haven't looked at any stats at all in months, but I looked today, and I am definitely going to achieve both of these even if I only read US authors in December. I'm currently at about 42% US and 10% translated + 3% Finnish which, although not translated, is not English, so I kind of count it.

If anyone else is like me and feels the need to "fix stats" before the end of the year, now is the time to start (panicking) !

I'm quite good with the stats display - longest book, first review of the year and highest GR rated all goes to "Rhythms of War" - I can live with that :D.

I'm not good with the Shortest Book as it's this one: The Art of the Sword by Ru Emerson which shows as 10 pages (it's listed with 338 pages on the Amazon website)

CBRetriever wrote: "I'm not good with the Shortest Book as it's this one: The Art of the Sword by Ru Emerson which shows as 10 pages (it's listed with 338 pages on the Amazon website)"

Fixed. :)

wow that was fast however it's still showing as my shortest book and I know it's not - Xingu should be

maybe the stats take a while to update. Also those stats do not reflect omnibus or compilation books as I've read an additional 18 books. I'll stick with my spreadsheet

Yeah, there's likely a cache for that page - it says that there's a delay for new books updating, and I'm thinking it's probably an overnight refresh of the stats. By tomorrow it should be right. :)

My last review is of a book I didn't like so I have to change that by reviewing more books!

Gabi wrote: "I'm quite good with the stats display - longest book, first review of the year and highest GR rated all goes to "Rhythms of War" - I can live with that :D."

My longest book is Oathbringer and most popular Words of Radiance ;-)

I'm with you, Anna. I always hate something on my Year in Books page. It's a disaster for me this year.

My longest book is xkcd: Time at a ridiculous though accurate 3101 pages. No fixing that unless I read In Search of Lost Time by December 31st!

My highest rated on Goodreads is Stardew Valley Guidebook, which is a factor of my keeping game guides on Goodreads (or even insisting on caring about them at all), I know, but really?

And my first review of the year was for Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which says "Look I finally read it. A delight from start to finish. Review to come." (I guess I could fix that one LOL.) None of my best books this year are anywhere on this page, except for my reread of Annihilation as most popular. Just a trash fire!

Amy, your YiB definitely sounds worse than mine :D Sorry but I can't help laughing.

No apologies necessary! It is absolutely funny.

My longest book is The Jake Grafton Collection: The Intruders, The Minotaur, Under Siege, and The Red Horseman which exemplifies the problem with the listing as this is actually 4 books

I love that my average rating for the year so far having read more than 200 books is 3.2 stars.

Reading? Love it. The books? Not so much.

My only complaint about my year in review is that one book doesn't have a cover (and I don't feel like hassling the librarians to get it put in) and the most popular on goodreads is stupid light fluff that is more of a guilty pleasure read than something I want out there.

I'm a librarian and would be happy to add the cover! DM me! :)

edit: Found it, cover added!

I don't mind the look of mine, although my shortest book (actually a novella) has got a terrible cover. Ugh. Loved the novella though.


I was surprised that my longest book was Lirael, which I reread recently. Didn't realise it was so long. Those 705 pages sure flew by.

My most popular? Project Hail Mary. No surprise, I suppose.

CBRetriever, when recording my books on GR I'm always unsure with book compilations, especially if I didn't read all books in the compilation. Usually I just 'cheat' by recording a read (of a different edition) of each separate book.

Compilations can be a handy money saver sometimes rather than buying each individual book, but I haven't read that many so it's not a big issue for me.

My most popular (and longest) is IT by Stephen King, a book I DNF'd this year on re-(re-re-)read because I just wasn't in the mood for the unrelenting fat-shaming in it.

Highest rated though is a cute one - Wheel-Mouse vs All The Crazy Robots by Celyn Lawrence, daughter of Mark Lawrence. :D

Becky, that's adorable! ^_^ My highest rated is often a children's book.

CBRetriever, when recording my books on GR I'm always unsure with book compilations, especially if I didn't read all books in the compilation. "

If I don't read all of them, it goes on my Later shelf. The Delphi ones take so long (2+ years for the Complete Mark Twain) and The Complete Wheel of Time (15 books) took a long time (February to July) to complete. Anyway I have two columns in my spreadsheet:

Count of Books
Books in

so the Wheel of Time was: 1____14
and the Jake Grafton was: 1____3

.

My highest rated book is also a children’s picture book. You Can’t Kiss Bubbles. It’s fairly new and has only 14 ratings, but all 5 stars.

Whoops - You Can’t Kiss a Bubble:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

An average rating of 4.9 with 37 books seems very wrong. Got to work on my generosity with ratings.

Interviewer: And what are your weaknesses?
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it.

LOL.

I thought my average 4.2 rating was over-generous. But I choose to consider it due to my prowess in choosing the really good books to read and skipping the others.

Allison wrote: "Interviewer: And what are your weaknesses?
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."

Hahahaha sounds about right.

DivaDiane wrote: "LOL.

I thought my average 4.2 rating was over-generous. But I choose to consider it due to my prowess in choosing the really good books to read and skipping the others."

I like to believe the books with potential 3/4 stars are on my currently reading or partially read shelves right now :)

Allison wrote: "Interviewer: And what are your weaknesses?
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."

<:D noooo! Don't give into the cynicism.

Jemppu wrote: "Allison wrote: "Interviewer: And what are your weaknesses?
Munachiso: Well, Goodreads says I'm too generous and too happy to find new things to enjoy. I'm working on it."

<:D noooo! Don't give int..."

Shall resist! : )

My longest to shortest goes from 8 pages to 2323.

And, seeing how I've hardly peeked into it, that longest one's visibility on the list is a bit of an overkill: besides longest read, it's the Least Popular and Highest Rated on Goodreads :P (As dictated by a whopping one rating; I'm tempted to give it a lower rating just to knock it off the top of my stats page *ha* ...Whelp. That worked).

Other than that, the page seems fine enough. Especially happy for the following gems to get highlighted:



(And The Dispossessed, of course, but this is not the first time and was rather calculated).

Anna wrote: "I'm a librarian and would be happy to add the cover! DM me! :)

edit: Found it, cover added!"

Omg thanks! It was really irritating me since it was so obvious what the cover should have been. But I hate not using my book's ISBN for my reviews so I thought I would just have to deal with it.

Now I just need to find a less embarrassing highest rated on goodreads book to read lol

I have corrected my Goodreads stats in a very pleasing way :D


Shortest book: 13 pages (The Fox)
Longest book: 1318 pages (1Q84)

I usually read more long books than I did this year, so my average page length is a bit lower than usual, but not by too much.
My Shortest: The Grownup, 64pgs
My Longest: Cyteen, 853pgs.

I am still reading a lot, but probably my average page length will not change much; right now it is at 265pgs, with 341 books completed. A LOT of those were murder mystery series books that were all ~200pgs long.
I do need to get back to finishing books though, I was ahead of my goal a few weeks ago by a lot, and now I'm behind by 5 books (!!!).

I think you’ve pretty much smashed it regardless, Jaimie!

It’s amusing to find that my longest read is not only less than 700 pages but also was a work of fiction that didn’t feel that long - probably because I enjoyed it (Michael Cobley’s Seeds of Earth) - rather than what felt like the really big nonfiction Revolution In Mind, which dragged on somewhat feeling like a thousand pages. I’m also a little surprised as how short that Five Introductory Letters book of Freud’s was at only 77 pages, but that’s probably because it felt dense!

Amusingly I seem to be the only person to have that Genocide book. Probably just as well. Terrible topic, not very good book. Now I just need to find something less cliche for my most popular read.

I’m stoked to have reached a personal maximum number of books for many years though. Going to try to make it to 50 before the end of the year. Not sure if I’ll be able to beat that next year… given studies.

Thanks for sharing that link Anna. I would have never seen that. I like the way its all laid out. Very cool.

Anna wrote: "I have corrected my Goodreads stats in a very pleasing way"

And then I got too enthusiastic about another reading project and went and f*cked things up again. I guess if there was ever a year in which Cthulhu deserved to be prominently featured on my YiB page, 2021 is it. So even though I have time to correct this, I won't.

(I am sad about losing Short Stories About Kittens, though, it was perfect!)

LOL Anna. Cthulhu IS perfect.

This isn't as good as it could be but for the first year since I joined goodreads I have read more non-white-male books than white-male.
It was close 45-41 so nothing earth shattering but I am happy about it.

The non-white writing/perspectives I enjoyed the most were

Angie Thomas
Elizabeth Acevedo
Katie Mack
P. Djeli Clark

If I can quit my Tchaikovsky/Reynolds/Hamilton habit things should be better next year.

Yay, Hank, that's amazing! ^_^

Well done, Hank!

62 books so far. Piranesi will make 63'

shortest 91 pages Eve in Hollywood
longest 878 pages To Sleep in a Sea of Stars though it felt like twice that long.
most popular The Midnight Library
highest rated What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

:D my stats now have "Rhythm of War" as my first review of the year and "The Way of Kings" as my last review of the year. I will not write any more reviews for the next days, because this is simply perfect.

I don't usually have any goals in mind for any of these, it's just fun to see what happens naturally. I did have one goal this year, and I already talked about it in this thread, but I'll talk about it again now that I have my finals stats!

Format: 83% audio, 17% eye-reads

Length: 81% novels, 16% short fic, 3% graphic/illustrated

Age: 79% adult, 9% YA, 9%MG, 3% kids

Genre:
25% fantasy
23% scifi
9% other specfic
13% other
2% nonfic
15% mystery/thriller
13% romance

Authors:
16% cis men, 84% not cis men
56% white cishet able people, 44% people I want to read from
45% US, 19% UK/Ireland, 8% Australia/New Zealand, 3% Canada, 3% Malaysia/Singapore, 3% Finland, 2% other Nordic countries, 17% other

34% #ownvoices
8% translated + 3% Finnish

These stats are better than last year, but I dream of the day when I'm not adding "have to read" old white American dudes to these stats :/ But I wanted to read less than 50% US authors, and I did, and I want to continue doing that in 2022. I also want to keep books written in English to max 90%, although I wish I could do much better. I don't think it's realistic right now to aim much higher, but maybe I could get to 10% translated without having to rely on Finnish making up the difference?

I finished 156 books in 2021. I’ve been logging my books read since 2005, and the only years I completed more books were 2006 (158) and 2008 (166). Out of the 156, a little more than half (80) were sff. “most popular” was Mexican Gothic, “least popular” was The Jonbar Point: Essays from SF Horizons. Very few of the books I read were new 2021 publications. Of these my favourites were The Witness for the Dead and on the non-genre side A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

I’m probably going to continue to read more older books than new ones, partly because there are lots of classics I want to read, and partly because I really want to make an impact on the TBR shelves and piles. However I think I’ll try to read more new things this year.

My 2021 reads were dominated by self-published authors, and I'm proud of it.

The average length ended up being 300 pages, yay for nice round numbers.

The most popular book I've read (at 7,4k shelved) was also my lowest-rated.

The least popular book I've read had exactly 0 other people reading it. Makes me feel like Indiana Jones going into a temple in search of treasure.

I read 139 books in 2021, though a lot of those were short stories which I think drove my average page count (280 pp) down too. My average rating was 3.5. Longest book: Jade Legacy (736).

The only truly annoying thing about my GR year in books is that "highest rated" is for a book that I DNF'd, which was rated 4.8. Plus, though I usually rate my DNFs, I didn't in this instance since there were very few ratings and I didn't want to have a big negative impact.

Other stats I track:

Genre
scifi 44
fantasy 59
mystery 21
other fiction 3
non-fic 3

anthology/collections 7


Author stats
female 74
male 24
non-binary 2

authors of color 28
white authors 70

lgbtq+ authors 8

I started tracking author country this year (inspired by Anna) and US authors were more than 2x the authors from all other countries combined. So, for 2022 I'll work on reading more non-US authors as well as more non-cis-het-white authors.

They should really figure out how to determine the truly highest rated book based on ratings + number of ratings.

The highest rated book I read is a poetry book that I gave 5 stars and so did the other 4 people who rated it.

Well, at least you were unanimous. ;)

Longest read = The Jake Grafton Collection: The Intruders, The Minotaur, Under Siege, and The Red Horseman by Stephen Coonts at 1,864 pages = but it shouldn't count as it's 4 books in one

Highest Rated = The Jake Grafton Collection: The Intruders, The Minotaur, Under Siege, and The Red Horseman. It was terrible and I almost DNF'd it

Shortest Read = Homesick by Lyn Venable at 10 pages which Amazon insists = 26 pages

Least popular = one of the Tor short story collections


93,267 pages read and 257 books read (this should be higher due to omnibus editions)

Wow, Chessie, that is really impressive.