Goodreads offered up a review of my reading year, and I was astounded to discover I’ve read 31 books (6910 pages) this past year, and I will finish at least one more before the year is out.

That might not sound like a huge number to avid readers, but for me, as a writer, that’s a lot of reading. And I reviewed every one of those.

I might just have to take myself in hand next year, and concentrate a tad more on the writing, as I only published short stories this year, not a novel, but hey, I also earned quite a lot writing non-fiction for websites, and the reading keeps my creative mind juiced up.

If you’re interested, you can catch my year’s reading at: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015/16900794?utm_medium=email&utm_source=yyib_2015_12

My shortest read was 65 pages

 Review here

The longest, at 574 pages, was Sleight of Hand (slight cheat as it was an audio book)

 Review here

The highest rated (on Goodreads) of the books I read was D.G. Kaye’s humorous memoir, Meno-what?

 Review here

And the most popular (on Goodreads) was Miss Mabel’s School for Girls

 Review here

I’d like to highlight in addition to those already mentioned, the following as favourites of this year:

 Just plain hilarious! Review here

 Fascinating and compelling. Review here

 A fabulous end to an awesome trilogy. Review here

You can catch all my reviews here

My overall review average for the year is 4.3 *, which might seem a little high. Even before Goodreads offered this overview of my reading year, I’d been thinking about writing a post on my review scores, so here, in brief, are my thoughts.

5 stars – I loved the book and found very little I wasn’t happy with, in all aspects of writing, plotting, characterisation etc.

4 stars – I liked the book, but had a few niggling issues with such things are language, punctuation, plot, editing or character depth and development.

3 stars – the book was okay, but probably not for me, or else it had fairly large editing issues that, if dealt with, would have turning it into a 4* book.

2 or 1 stars – you won’t find these in my reviews, because I either contacted the author directly with the large editing or plotting problems that plagued the book, or, I simply stopped reading, so DNF (about 10 of those this year).

Hence the reason my reviews all look positive and my score is skewed rather high.

I admit I believe I am becoming somewhat of a grammar and editing snob. By the time I have noticed a half dozen (or even less) mistakes or amateur sentence constructions in the first few pages, I no longer continue. There are too many good, well edited, well plotted and exciting books out there to waste my precious reading time on books that were not yet ready to be published, but were pushed out anyway.

Do you agree with me? Or am I being overly harsh?

How was your reading year?