All The Right Reads

Hi, friends.

Tabatha, one of our founders and our most prolific review poster, regularly updates her reading stats over on her personal blog. Or, at least, she has in previous years. This year we thought it might be fun to move her content HERE so you can all see her reading stats.

What do you need to know?

1. She reads A LOT. She typically takes on 2-3 reviews or ARCS for us each month but that’s only a fraction of what she reads.
2. She reads EVERYTHING. Seriously. There are genres she’ll flock to more easily when left to her own devices (thrillers) but she’ll read anything!
3. She reviews everything she reads. You may have noticed that.
4. She doesn’t think reading is a competition, she just likes statistics and likes looking at what she’s read. This isn’t intended to make you feel bad, it’s just for your information!
5. If you see something you’re curious about, ASK. Someone will dig into the stats and see if we can find you an answer.

So, with that all out of the way, let’s dig into October.

Here are the books Tab read during the month.

• 16 total books
• 4,720 total pages
• 18% independently published

She knows this is what she read because she tracks each one in a little journal. We’ll throw those pages at the end of this post, just for fun!

What genres are those?

Once again, none of us are surprised by the mystery/thriller bar. But the horror bar coming in hot was fun.

What age categories?

At this point if Tab has a month where her reading is NOT dominated by adult aged books, we’d all be surprised.

Where does she get all her books?

We love a good free book around here and we are HUGE fans of the library. So it makes total sense that the library keeps taking such a large portion of Tab’s graph for this question. Again, the library comes out on top.

We can break this down even further for you. All of the borrowed (blue section) was borrowed from the library. The red section includes 1 ARC copy from the publisher and Netgalley as well as 2 review copies from the authors (submitted through our website). The yellow represents an audiobook purchased directly from the author at Fan Fusion and a book she picked up at our favorite independent used bookstore.

What format does she read?

Everything. This pie chart fluctuates a lot from month to month. Although the audiobook category always hovers around 50% and that looks like a LOT on a chart like this, that really just means Tab always has one audiobook and one other format going at the same time. The math is mathing.

STAR RATINGS:

• 0 1-star books. That makes sense because this is RARE for us. At alltherightreads we say a book has to be one we cannot recommend to get this rating.
• 1 2-star books. These are books that were problematic, for some reason. The full reviews would lay out why. We usually say something about these just rubbed us the wrong way.
• 7 3-star books. This is probably our most common rating. For us, these books are GOOD but they’re NICHE for some reason. Before we could recommend them to you, we’d have to find out if you’re in that niche. Sometimes it’s because of content warnings, sometimes it’s because they’re just for a really specific reader. If you happen to be in this niche, however, these could be your absolute favorite books!
• 8 4-star books. These are books that we’d recommend just based on the fact that you say you read this genre. They’re just GREAT examples of their genre. For Tab this month those were:
  • The Stranger in Her House which is a mystery/thriller with a surprising twist that really worked. If you like to be surprised by a good thriller with a twist, this one works.
  • 1521 the Defiance is a historical fiction that takes a look at a lesser known period of time in a great way.
  • Play Nice is a horror that plays with the haunted house trope and shows the unraveling of a character well!
  • Dissection of a Murder is a mystery/thriller that takes courtroom drama to new levels.
  • Melissa is a beautiful book about a trans youth just trying to get through the school year. Quick, valuable, and well written.
  • The Ruins is an exciting horror that brings danger right to the frontlines. Great storyline if you like paranormal stuff in your horror.
  • The Games Gods Play is heavy on the fantasy but also brings some romance. It’s well balanced and intense.
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a classic autobiography that’s worth a read (or a reread).
• 0 5-star book. These books are ones that CROSS GENRES. We’d recommend them to almost any reader but definitely to readers of at least 2 genres. Crossing genres can be difficult for any author because you have to do both well. It’s not unusual to have none of those in a month and this happened to be one of those.

As promised, here are her crazy journal pages.

TLDR: Tab read 16 books in October.