Closing the books – 2020 edition

The geographical distribution (author’s country of birth) of my 2020 reading. (Guide on how to make this type of maps).

It is, finally, a New Year, and thus time for my final reading statistics post of 2020. All in all it has at least been a good reading year, in total I finished 141 books in 2020 (123 in 2019, 118 in 2018 and 99 in 2017), 63 by a woman, 76 by a man and 2 by multiple authors. Although the increase in books read may be partly due to a tendency to select less challenging reads and a higher proportion of comfort reads.

Decade of first publication for the books I read during 2020.

I may not have travelled very far physically in 2020, but fortunately my reading had no such problems. As in the previous years books by authors from UK (47), US (43) and Sweden (18) dominated my reading, but I have managed to read books written by authors from 23 countries (22 in 2019, 27 in 2018 and 21 in 2017), which I am fairly happy with.

Some 2020 reading highlights have included:

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• A woman in the polar night by Christiane Ritter
• Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg
• Asken Yggdrasil by Alf Henriksson
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
• The thing around your neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Even though I haven’t been very active this year, writing only 19 blog posts, book blogging remains my primary place for bookish discussions, so I am very happy for all of you who keep visiting and commenting, thank you!

Most visited blog posts in 2020

• Why everyone needs to read The Brothers Lionheart (from 2018)
• Personal book canon – a self portrait in books (my own favourite post of the year)
• 1956 in children’s literature

I wish you all a happy new reading year!