So…who here forgot I existed?
It was completely unplanned that I dropped off the face of the blogging world in April of 2022, with no goodbye or anything, but I wanted to come back quickly to talk about my reading over the rest of 2022 and maybe provide a little bit of explanation for vanishing.
(By the way, I have kind of forgotten a lot of things about using WordPress and aesthetics and stuff, so if this post is horribly boring and/or messed up, you will have to forgive me).
I remember the end of last year, and reading everyone’s awesome yearly wrap ups and seeing the super cool graphs (the graphs are literally the coolest)! I had never kept track of my reading so closely, but I decided to try it out in 2022 and although some things didn’t come out quite as planned, there were a few things I was pretty happy about. Let’s look at my year!

Books Read: 67
Pages Read: 24,274
Average Rating: 3.8
(Above stats are courtesy of goodreads)
Honestly, I’m not super happy with how my reading turned out this year. At the same time that I went on an accidental blog hiatus, in April, I also went into a book slump that not only involved me reading very few books, but also meant that I wasn’t logging my books on goodreads much, because I was just staying away from the book world in general. At around September or October, I began to mark books as read again, and attempted to put down any books I’d read over the summer as well, but I’m probably missing some. Regardless, my reading was down tremendously this year. When I started logging books on goodreads in 2020, I read 183 books. In 2021, I read only slightly less, with 157. So 67 books is a huge dip for me, which I’m kind of upset about. Of course, I have to take into account the fact that my 2020 year was almost entirely virtual, and I had quite a bit of online school in 2021 as well, which gave me more time to read, but I’m still sad about my reading this year.

Onto the statistics! (aka the part I have been waiting a year to write about)
(My graphs are kind of messy, as I put all the text on them manually, and I’ve never been a technology/design person, so please forgive me)
Rating:

As usual, I rated most of my books 4 or 3.5 stars (almost all books that I rated 3.5 stars here were rated 4 stars on goodreads). I did rate 5 books 5 stars, which is nice, and I didn’t rate any book below 2.5 stars because I really hate rating books badly, so I usually need to have very strong feelings on a book to give it that rating.
Genre:

This graph made me laugh when I saw it, because there’s just so many different genres! There was a point in my life when I read almost exclusively fantasy, and although fantasy is still excellent, I branched out a lot this year, and I’m really happy with the results! I found a love for realistic fiction/contemporary books, and I also read quite a few historical fiction books as well! I read less sci fi and dystopian this year, which is also something I’m kind of happy about, because I’ve never loved those genres and I’m glad that I’m learning my lessons and reading less genres I dislike!
(note: the ‘thriller’ section encompasses thrillers, mystery books, and horror books, and the ‘memoir’ section encompasses both memoirs and nonfiction books).
Age Range:

As expected, I read more YA books than anything else, but I was surprised at the lack of middle grade books I read. Usually I read a fair amount of middle grade, but not this year! And I’m happy about the number of books in the adult category I read, as well – I’ve always found adult books to be slow and more difficult to get through, but I enjoyed several that I read this year!
Type of Book:

This one is not at all a surprise, but I find it funny nonetheless. I…basically only read novels. Part of this is also that I rarely count graphic novels as books that I read because I can read them so fast that I almost feel like I’m ‘cheating’ my reading challenge – but I do really enjoy graphic novels and I’m certain that I have read more than three of them this year. Short story collections and plays, as well as other types of content, are just not things that I am very interested in (the one play that I did read this year was for school, too).
Publication year:

Over half the books I read were from either 2022 or 2021, which is completely unsurprising. If there’s a book I’m interested in that was published two years ago, I’ve probably already read it (that sentence doesn’t make a ton of sense, but whatever). I am interested that my second highest category after 2022 and 2021 was books from before 2016. Now granted, there are a ton of years before 2016, and a ton of books published in those years, but it’s still pretty surprising to be (I think about 4 or 5 of those books, however, were ones I had to read for school).
Format:

Over the height of the COVID-19 quarantine, I read a lot of books on my kindle. So I was pretty surprised when I looked at this graph and the very vast majority of books that I read were physical instead of ebooks. Over this year, I’ve regained my love for reading physical books, either from the library or books I owned, which is pretty interesting to see. I also listened to a few audiobooks during the beginning of the year, but that died out pretty quickly because I’ve just never been a huge fan of audiobooks.
Diversity/Representation

I am not a huge fan of the way that I set up this part of my reading graphs, and I plan to do a little changing things up for next year, but I still think this is pretty cool to see! Out of all the books I read, 77.2% of them had some kind of representation, and more than half the books I read had LGBTQ+ rep! Obviously I hope to keep improving the amount of representation that I read, but I also think it’s especially important to read ownvoices authors, so next year I definitely want to make sure that I make it easier to mark that..
(Special thanks to May@Forever and Everly and her 2021 wrap up who I took a lot of inspiration from for what graphs to include).

Favorite books this year:



Of course I can’t go one post without talking about my favorite books. Loveless and Ophelia After All are established favorites which I read earlier in the year, but I also gained a new favorite which I got at Christmas: One for All by Lillie Lainoff. One for All is a retelling of The Three Musketeers (and I didn’t know anything about The Three Musketeers aside from the fact that it’s a candy bar) following a girl in France at around the 1650s. The girl, Tania de Batz, gets sent to what she believes is a finishing school once her father dies, only to learn that it is actually a training school for female muskateers. Tania has POTS, a chronic illness categorized by near-constant dizziness, and I think that the author (who also has POTS) wrapped it into the story really well – it was always present and never forgotten about, but it also did not define Tania and she had tons of other character traits. I loved the found family in this book (one of my favorite tropes!!) and overall it was just a fantastic story with plenty of action but also some really heartfelt moments.
As for Loveless and Ophelia After All, I think I’ve spent enough time talking about them, but you can check out my review of Loveless on my blog here, and you can read my (very short) goodreads review of Ophelia After All here.

Looking Back on my 2022 Reading Goals
At the beginning of 2022, I published a post titled: “Welcome 2022: Reading Plans for the Year,” something that I completely forgot about until I stumbled upon it today. So, how did I do in my 2022 goals and plans?
- Read 100 books: Well, that certainly did not occur. My reading this year was significantly worse than it has been in several years, so I only managed to read 67 books, and I think I’m going to be setting my goodreads goal a little lower next year.
- I mentioned five books that I wanted to read this year and I’m happy to say that I read four of them! The last one, What We Devour by Linsey Miller, I unfortunately DNFed, but I did enjoy the others!
- My anticipated releases section also lived up to my expectations. I loved three of my anticipated releases, but the other two are ones that I haven’t gotten around to yet, and hope to soon.

Where I’ve Been and Where We’re Going From Here
Time to address the elephant in the room: I haven’t posted since April of this year, more than six months ago. As I stated previously, it was completely unplanned that I vanished from the blogging world. I had kept up a consistent schedule of posting once a week until April, but around that time I was running out of posting ideas that I was excited to write, and school and my softball season was taking a lot of my time. Not only that, but I began to realize that I wasn’t enjoying blogging as much anymore. When I would sit down to write a blog post, it felt like more of a chore, something that I needed to get out for my readers and not actually an activity that I thought was fun. When I took a week, and then two, off from blogging, it didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything, and it just lifted one more thing I had to do every weekend off my chest.
Another thing that I realized was that I hated all the formatting and aesthetics of blogging. I was spending so much time making each of my posts look nice, and look uniform, when all I actually wanted to do was write about books. You might be able to tell from this post that I spent less time on the formatting – my section headers aren’t the same color as they used to be, and I’ve added less pictures and linked less things, because I never enjoyed doing that.
So, what’s next? Where am I going from here? I love the book blogging community, I love all the people, and I love reading everyone’s bookish posts. But I don’t know if I love writing those posts myself. So, I can’t tell you if I’m going to come back and post anything else. I think I want to play it by feel, and if one day I open up my computer and decide I want to write another post, then I’ll put one out. Is this likely to happen? Probably not. There were times over the past several months when I would wander onto WordPress to see how everyone is doing, and I would pop into my drafts folder, but I never had the motivation or the yearning to write a new post. Do I want to say that this is the definite end of Books With Wings? Absolutely not. Things change. Maybe I’ll find enjoyment in this once again after a few months. Maybe I’ll never really get back what I once had by posting here, but decide that every once in a while, I’ll come back. If I do come back, my posts will probably look a little different – less aesthetics and formatting, more words. Probably more discussions or random rambles instead of tags and book reviews.
All of this doesn’t mean I want to stop talking to everyone on here, though! I’ve met so many wonderful people through book blogging and I love talking to all of you. But, given that I’ll be on wordpress less, I’ll also probably be responding to comments slower, or not at all (there are five comments sitting in my comments section, waiting to be responded to…if that’s you, I apologize). If you do want to continue talking to me (and I would love to hear from you!) you can use the ‘contact me‘ section of my blog, or message me on goodreads.

Life Update:
So what’ve I been up to in the months that I’ve been gone?
- A lot of softball. As I mentioned earlier, softball played a pretty significant part in why I vanished from the blogging world. In the spring, I was playing on both my school team and a town league team, so I was pretty much playing softball every day of the week.
- School ended, summer happened, and then school started again. I feel like time has been going by SO fast and I cannot believe I’m already in the next grade and it’s already the end of December.
- Over the summer I (kinda) got a job, and I also went on a roadtrip. I worked for exactly 1 week over the summer (whoops). But I’d never gone on a roadtrip before and it was actually very fun! I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much because it was a lot of time in the car (10.5 hours of driving in one day, anyone?) but it was just a cool thing to do!

I would love to hear what everyone’s been up to in the months that I’ve been gone! Please drop a comment so I can hear how you’ve been and what you’ve been up to! (PS: if anyone can tell me how to change the font color in ‘list’ blocks, I would appreciate that greatly. It appears wordpress has undergone some changes in the time I’ve been gone).
