Ten years ago, I published the very first post on this blog. It was the third blog I’d ever started, and out of the thirteen blogs I’ve started for both personal and work purposes, it’s the only one still up and consistently active. Except for one short and unintentional hiatus due to college, Bluejay Reads has been running for a decade, and I had planned to do a big commemorative post for the occasion, featuring a bunch of stats and lists for my last ten years of reading.
However, I couldn’t find the motivation to do something massive and all-encompassing – especially since most of it would have to be done the day before to keep the statistics accurate. Plus the bias of recency would make any favorite books of the last ten years skew towards the recent (as is obvious in the “Reading Highlights” section of this post – only one of the books featured there I read pre-2017).
So instead, you get this. A few fun facts and statistics (I love statistics, my list of read books currently tracks 14 different statistics of my annual reading), highlights of a few noteworthy books with no attempt to pick any “Favorite Books of the Decade,” and a brief retrospective on reviewing, book choices, and how my understanding of books has changed as I’ve grown from a teenager into an adult.
Ten Years of Reading Stats
These stats are not 100% accurate, mainly because I didn’t divide my read books list for 2012 by month. I have the aggregate data for the entire year, but I have no way of knowing which books I read before and which ones I read after starting this blog. So these stats are for a little over ten years: January 1, 2012 through September 10, 2022.
Total Books Read: 928
Total Books Read by Year:
- 2012: 187
- 2013: 133
- 2014: 89
- 2015: 26
- 2016: 9
- 2017: 31
- 2018: 31
- 2019: 48
- 2020: 59
- 2021: 162
- 2022: 153 (January 1-September 10)
Total Books Reviewed: 642 (including 40 Review Shorts)
One of my bucket list items is to review 1,000 books – I’m definitely making progress!
Just for Fun, Some Very Inaccurate Graphs from The StoryGraph
These stats are even more inaccurate than the ones above. I didn’t start using Goodreads until 2013, I didn’t start seriously using Goodreads until a while after that, and I’m sure some of the data got messed up in the import to The StoryGraph and I haven’t bothered to go through and fix it. But I like pretty charts and The StoryGraph likes to give me pretty charts, so here are a few!
Blog Stats
Since it’s been going for 10 years now, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the statistics of the actual blog and see what’s happened. Except for a brief period in 2013-2014 when I thought having a popular book review blog might make it easier to get one of my own novels published, I haven’t put any effort into promoting this blog. I also haven’t looked at the stats in several years and didn’t even know WordPress gave some of these statistics, so this is a fun surprise for me, too!
Total followers: 108 (104 via WordPress, 4 via email)
All-time traffic: 6,321 unique visitors, 9,172 total views
Total number of posts: 579
Total number of words written: 369,062
Average words per post: 637
Most words written: 2021, with 118,677 words across 182 posts
Most popular review: The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts, with 621 views. I have no idea why that is the most popular thing I’ve written on this blog, as it was neither a particularly remarkable book (a childhood favorite, but I had outgrown it by the time I reviewed it) or a particularly remarkable review.
Reading Highlights of the Decade
Due to the biases of recency, this list skews towards books read in the last 2-3 years. But they are all fantastic books, and some of them have influenced my life and (especially in the case of Vita Nostra) the way I read, so I thought it was worth at least highlighting a few books.
Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor. I have reread this book four times. The first three were sometime before 2010, when I checked out three books from the library and loved this one so much that instead of reading all three books, I read this one three times back to back. It held up as a reread in 2013, and it still lives in my memory as one of the best books I’ve ever read. I am still trying to get my hands on a copy with the original, now-out-of-print orange cover that I first read.
Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. After finishing this book, I knew it was a fantastic book, but I didn’t think it would end up on any “favorite reads” lists. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still can’t. It took a spot in my top 5 for 2021, and here it is again in noteworthy books of the last ten years. It had a significant effect on my reading habits – I’m reading more translated books, more Russian literature, more magical realism, more literary stuff that’s weird and out there and bizarre. I am still chasing the high of this book, looking for something else that’s as surreal, unsettling, and utterly, helplessly engrossing.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I don’t know what it is about this book, but despite having never used the KonMari organizing methods on my stuff, I keep coming back to it. I first read it in 2017 on CD in my car, then reread it as an ebook in 2019, then again as an audiobook in 2021 and twice 2022. It’s a combination of comforting and inspiring and I love the calm, relaxing, and overall hopeful mood – kind of like a mom or older sister who gently says, “Yes, I see we have a problem, but I know we can fix it together.” I even (temporarily) converted to Shinto because of this book. It’s almost a comfort read, in a way, which is absolutely bizarre for a book on cleaning and organizing. Regardless, I find it worth reading just for itself.
Severance by Ling Ma. I picked this up mainly because it didn’t sound like anything I’d read before, and by the time I finished it I felt off-kilter, like my life (or my psyche) was in a box that just got knocked off a table and nothing inside can ever be the same again. I’m still thinking about it, or more accurately I’m still trying to recover from it. It’s one of those books that’s both horrible and fantastic in that it will absolutely mess you up and you should definitely not pick it up unless you’re ready for existential despair, serious soul-searching, and a sudden and intense desire to reevaluate your entire life. One of the very few books I would legitimately describe as life-altering.
An Honorable Mention to a Few Noteworthy Reads
The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer. It starts out solidly in the Middle Grade and slowly transitions into Young Adult, and I discovered it at the perfect age for it to help ease my reading transition into YA.
Dare Me by Eric Devine. This is less because the read itself was remarkable (it was very good, but not earth-shattering), but because I’m particularly proud of the review. On Twitter, the author called it “maybe the best review of DARE ME yet.”
A Few Thoughts on Reading Choices, Understanding Stories, and Growing Up as a Reviewer
When I started this blog, I was a teenager – still in high school, still too young to have a driver’s license. Too young, in fact, to quite grasp the concept that my opinion of a book was not universal. My original goal with this site was to create a comprehensive website where there was a review of every single book so people could find out if a book was bad or not. (Though the site name has changed, the tagline “Life’s too short to read bad books” is the original from 2012.)
When I reviewed books in the early days, I started with an outline. The outline set the topic for every paragraph, and went something like this:
- Introduction, why I chose to read this book
- Thoughts on the protagonist
- Thoughts on the other protagonist or love interest, if applicable
- Thoughts on secondary, minor, and side characters
- If the plot was interesting, made sense, or was too easy to guess
- Thoughts on the setting, if it was noteworthy
- Other opinions, if applicable (this was self-published and needed an editor, thoughts about the romance or character relationships, this book would have been better if this happened instead, etc.)
- Conclusion: Would I read this again, recommend it, or read sequels?
It was very formulaic, and in many cases pretty boring. I also focused only on what was on the page. I neither noticed nor looked for any themes, motifs, or messages. Back then, I didn’t understand what any of those things really were and I thought looking at anything beyond the story’s entertainment value actively made the reading experience worse.
At the end of high school and my first year of college, I went through a hyper-religious phase. My review focus switched to how “edifying” a book was – i.e. how well it supported the fundamentalist Christian system of values and beliefs. I kept a piece of paper nearby when I read books so I could count how many times characters swore, and each review came with a “report card” to score how moral it was. Those reviews were spectacularly bad, and I’ve deleted most of them.
When I got back into reviewing in 2017, I originally went back to my old outline format. But I quickly realized that didn’t always create great reviews. I floundered along for a while, knowing I still wanted to write reviews but that the old review format no longer worked. And then last year, something just clicked.
I think it was a combination of factors. Some of it was me getting older, my brain maturing, and having more life experience. A large part was the sheer number and variety of books I read that year exposing me to new kinds of stories and new ways of writing. In 2021, I got a job that let me wear earbuds while I worked, and I started reading audiobooks for 40 hours a week. And when you read that many books, eventually you start seeing the threads beneath and between them. Regardless of the reason, though, I discovered I understood what a motif was, I could identify themes, and far from detracting from the reading experience, spotting the deeper threads of meaning behind a good story can make it even better.
That realization changed both my reviews and my reading choices.
First, I stopped trying to force my reviews to cover any particular aspect of a book. Reviews are personal and reflect my opinion, and if my opinion is less about plot and characters and more about the feelings the story evoked in me (see: Severance), my review could generally ignore plot and characters and just be about the feelings. Personally, I think that made my reviews significantly better.
Second, I’m willing to try a much broader range of books now. For a long time, I stuck to fantasy and the occasional sci-fi, mostly YA, because that’s what I knew I liked. With the job I got in 2021, the majority of my reading was limited to my library’s audiobook collection – which is admittedly extensive, but most of those books are not YA fantasy. I began to read beyond my standard fare out of necessity, and discovered that books that aren’t YA fantasy can be pretty good, too. It turns out I don’t hate the romance genre if it’s done well, I don’t hate graphic novels, horror can actually be really good, and magical realism is absolutely fantastic. I’ve also found a taste for slower, more meditative novels, early-modern and modern Russian magical realism (which sounds incredibly pretentious, let’s be honest), and especially books that are weird, bizarre, and off-kilter. But I’m now a lot more willing to try things I’m not sure I’ll like and see what happens. (The only thing I haven’t really had the courage to tackle yet is historical fiction.)
Working on this blog has been a fantastic adventure. Even though this retrospective isn’t very in-depth, it’s interesting to take a look back on how my reading tastes and reviewing style have changed. I’ve gone from sticking to YA only to reading more non-YA than YA (though I still do appreciate a good YA book now and then), from a strict review format to reviewing in whatever way feels like it fits the book, and from a rigid line between “books I like” and “books I won’t like” to a more flexible willingness to try all sorts of things, even if I don’t end up liking them in the end. I am excited to see how my reading evolves and changes in the next ten years.
Bluejay Reads 