The year 2021 is when I really started getting back into reading. I had already increased the amount of time I spent reading in 2020, largely because I (we) were homebound due to the pandemic. But 2021 is when I decided to make reading a priority on my list of hobbies. As I mentioned in the 12 Days of Christmas Book Tag, the A Court of Thorns and Roses series spurred my reading habits into high gear. When I finished reading A Court of Mist and Fury, which left me a major book hangover, I realized I had no one with which to talk about it! That’s when I decided I wanted to start a book blog. Thanks to a lot of advice from Carolin at Solo Travel Story about choosing my blog name, I got A Literary Escape up and running in March 2021.

I’ve had a lot of fun “meeting” so many fellow book reviewers on Twitter. It’s impossible to keep up with all of the new book reviews, but I read and share what I can! I want to give a few shout outs to some amazing book reviewers who made me feel “at home” in the community:

• Chris at Biblio Nerd Reflections, who writes amazing reviews; is incredibly nice and is always happy to chit chat over Twitter comments; shares my blog posts without fail; and who I can ask about silly NetGalley questions to since I still feel like a newb.
• Ariana Jane at Book Nook Reviews for sharing my reviews of some of your favorite reads.
• Julie at One Book More for always liking my blog posts. I am constantly impressed at the volume of content you create!
• Caitlin at Realms of My Mind for a nice rapport over Twitter.

Of course there are many others with whom I interact on social media. I can’t list everyone, but I do appreciate each and every one of our interactions.

Reading Statistics
StoryGraph looks like such a cool way to break down your reading statistics. I’m not about to sign up now and convert my 2021 reads. But I might look more into it for 2022. Regardless, here are some of my statistics from Goodreads.

I read 48 books and 17,190 pages. That’s up from 29 book and 9,696 pages in 2020.

The shortest book I read was milk and honey by Rupi Kaur, which has 204 pages. This is a book of poetry that I didn’t write a review for. The longest book I read was A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas, which has 757 pages.

I feel like the “Most Popular” and “Least Popular” categories don’t accurately describe their purpose. “Most Popular” means out of all the books I read in a given year, here’s the most read/shelved book by others on Goodreads. The same concept applies to “Least Popular.” Publication date is a large influence on this statistic. The most popular book I read was A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas; 1,655,101 people shelved this book. The least popular book I read was Sugar and Snow by Irene Davis; 111 people shelved this book.

Blog Statistics
Over the span of 9 months I accrued 31 followers. Thank you to those who enjoy my content enough to subscribe! I didn’t spend a lot of time promoting my blog following until December. Initially I thought it might be weird to self promote since I try to stay true to the philosophy that the number of followers doesn’t define my worth. This is a hobby for me, not a job, and I wanted to keep it fun. But at the same time, I feel that the number of blog followers is truer (in my case) to how many people my content reaches. It’s easy to follow someone on Twitter, but less so on WordPress.

I posted a total of 69 times, which averages to approximately 7.7 posts per month. I also posted:

• 39 book reviews
• 12 First Lines Fridays
• 6 WWW Wednesdays
• 3 blog tours, which make up part of the book review total

And that’s as in depth as I’ll go for 2021. If I get StoryGraph or choose to make a tracking spreadsheet, I hope to be able to have some statistics on genres read, page counts, etc. at the end of 2022.

Happy New Year!