As some of you may have noticed, we’re doing something a little different this year. Namely, I have a new baby in the house (she’s currently mewling at me from her swing, refusing to go to sleep), and don’t have the time for the monthly updates. So I instead wanted to focus on quarterly updates (which I think I did last year). That turned into a half-year update….and here I am in August finally getting around to it.
But – and this is the good news – I’ve taught myself a bit of coding, which has made my job so much easier. Instead of scrolling through every post and manually inputting the information into my database, I can harvest this site one page at a time, and it’s mostly an automated process. Also – I was able to do the same for all of CBR3. Huzzah!
That just leaves CBR1 and 2 (much of which has been lost to time, or still reside somewhere on blogs scattered to the far corners of the internet) and CBR4 (my next project).
I’m feeling accomplished.
However, I haven’t been keeping the Goodreads information up to date (one drawback of the automated harvesting). So, the database looks more sparse than it used to.
Anyway, on with the stats!
Monthly review totals (total for 2018):
January – 515 (416)
February – 436 (316)
March – 394 (355)
April – 377 (380)
May – 429 (398)
June – 394 (377)
July – 490 (334)
Most popular books:
Becoming by Michelle Obama (12 reviews)
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (12 reviews)
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (10 reviews)
Normal People by Sally Rooney (10 reviews)
99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne (9 reviews)
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley (9 reviews)
On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (7 reviews)
Severance by Ling Ma (7 reviews)
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (6 reviews)
The Austen Playbook by Lucy Parker (5 reviews)
Circe by Madeline Miller (5 reviews)
The Huntress by Kate Quinn (5 reviews)
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (5 reviews)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (5 reviews)
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (5 reviews)
Unf*ck Your Habitat: You’re Better than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman (5 reviews)
The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden (5 reviews)
Most popular authors:
Stephen King (26 reviews)
Agatha Christie (23 reviews)
JK Rowling (15 reviews)
Popular genres:
Fiction: 2,329 (76.7%)
Non-Fiction: 529 (5.7% of fiction)
Fantasy: 393 (12.9%)
Children: 349 (11.5)
Romance: 318 (10.5%)
Mystery: 377 (12.4%)
Science Fiction: 198 (6.5%)
Young Adult: 308 (10.1%)
Memoir: 227 (44.79% of nonfiction)
Graphic Novel: 154 (5.1%)
Top 10 reviewers (as of July 31):
1. vel veeter (434)
2. BlackRaven (290)
3. classic (179)
4. badkittyuno (93)
5. Jake (70)
6. Chris (72)
7. narfna (71)
8. lowercasesee (63)
9. Caitlin_D (66)
10. Malin (58)
CBR Database:
27,886 reviews*
15,571 individual books reviewed
Annual review totals (CBR2-9):
2010. 1,881
2011. 2,335
2012. 3,138
2013. 3,574
2014. 3,061 (1,713 through June 30)
2015. 3,837 (1,990)
2016. 3,447 (1,876)
2017. 4,146 (2,349)
2018. 4,390
Annual participant totals:
2010. 95 (15 cannonballs)
2011. 95 (22)
2012. 141 (33)
2013. 148 (31)
2014. 136 (28)
2015. 109 (31)
2016. 122 (30)
2017. 141 (25)
2018. 125 (19)
Top 20 Reviewers of All Time: (total reviews; ranking last year)
1. vel veeter (1,448; 4th)
2. Malin (1,187; 1st)
3. badkittyuno (1,076; 2nd)
4. narfna (1,026; 3rd)
5. bonnie (743; 5th)
6. BlackRaven (781; 20th)
7. Jen K (699; 6th)
8. Sophia (585; 7th)
9. Caitlin_D (576; 8th)
10. Prisco (477; 13th)
11. alwaysanswerb (473; 9th)
12. scootsa1000 (473; 12th)
13. faintingviolet (468; 10th)
14. Mrs. Julien (429; 11th)
15. Lollygagger (421; 14th)
16. ElCicco (405; 17th)
17. emmalita (371; 19th)
18. Valyruh (364; 15th)
19. Travis_J_Smith (353; 16th)
20: Caitlin (335; 18th)
Just outside the top 20: is yesknopemaybe (295), ingres77 (286), Classic (275), The Chancellor (269), Lisa Bee (259), and melanir (258)
*My tentative user totals for CBR1-9 show that nearly 33k reviews have been written by the community to help raise money to fight cancer. I’ve catalogued roughly 85% of our reviews.
***My review totals may differ slightly from the “official” numbers due to errors I made in updating my data, or errors users make in countering their reviews.