Well, folks, we are almost there. 2020 is just about in our rearview mirror.

There will be no big party for us (but, to be fair, we never have or attend New Year’s Eve parties). We are planning to get takeout Chinese food and watch Avengers: Endgame, starting at exactly 9:29:30 pm, so that Iron Man snaps his fingers at exactly midnight. I’d say that is a pretty fitting end to 2020. Of course, I also thought it was a pretty fitting end to 2019, and look where it got us!

I did run the Best Nine app on my instagram account and here is my result:

The interesting thing about that is I think that every single one of those pictures was taken in November!

This is a really weird feeling for me, but I’m done reading for the year*. I have finished up all my books (*except Middlemarch, which Serial tells me I will finish in February) and I’m not starting anything new until 2021. And, when I say 2021, I mean as soon as I crawl into bed in 2021. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t fall asleep if I don’t read first.

Anyway, since I’m not reading at the moment and it isn’t yet time to order Chinese, I thought I’d share my 2020 reading stats:

Books read: 93

Of those 93 books…
* 51 were print books, 26 were eBooks, and 16 were audiobooks
* 20% were by male authors and 78% were by female authors (there were also a couple of collections with multiple authors)
* 26% of the books I read were written by people of color and 34% of the books were diverse in some way

I tracked how many books I read each month to see what, if any, effect quarantine had on my reading:
January – 8
February – 4
March – 7
April – 6
May – 9
June – 8
July – 4
August – 6
September – 4
October – 9
November – 9
December – 19

I can’t see that being stuck at home really had any effect, but what the heck happened in December??? It didn’t seem like I was reading twice as much as usual! However, I have been exhausted for most of this month, so maybe it was all that late night reading I’ve been doing.

If you are interested in seeing what I read, you can check out my Year in Books from Goodreads.

I’m not one to put too many constraints on my reading. In fact, the only reading challenge I do is the Goodreads challenge, which is just setting a number of books to finish. I’ve decided to set my goal at 96 for 2021, which is 3 more books than I read this year and an average of 8 books a month. Even if I don’t keep up my December pace, it should be a bit of challenge, but still doable.

So, there you go. As I finish this, I have about 8 hours left in 2020 and I hope that this year goes out with a whimper and that 2021 puts us back on the right path again. I know that it won’t be as easy as a snap of the fingers (see what I did there?), but I think that we have turned a corner and 2021 may hold some great things.