There are times in life when you’re riding pretty high. You think well of yourself. Any task is within your reach. Oh, you’re almost 40 years old and want to learn how to play a musical instrument for the first time in your life? Sure, why not? Pick up that guitar and start teaching yourself. Oh, you drifted through six years of learning the Russian language and walked away knowing only a handful of phrases and the first stanza to one song? Sure, sign up for Duolingo and teach yourself something more useful – like Spanish – in your spare time.
We’ve all been there, I’m sure. Maybe not on those specific things – but you get a wild hair and decide to learn something you probably would’ve had an easier time tackling a couple decades ago. But you only live once, so you might as well tackle it now.
Well, I’ve been working on this database for….four years now? Five? And for the first couple years, it was slow going. Like, I would pull up the home page and start manually plugging in each entry into an Excel sheet. When I first started, I was working nights, and everyone in the house was asleep when I got home. So spending an hour a day on it was kosher. Then I moved to first shift, and my wife and I had a second child, and life happened. So instead of updating this thing every month, it was every 3-6 months. Now it’s whenever I can find the time. And I would always include at the end of the stats update a promise to get around to including the older reviews – at some point.
So I worked on making it easier. I learned some basic coding (and I mean basic). Now I can do in a fraction of the time what used to take hours or days to do. Why? No one asked me to do this (though, I’m happy to see some appreciate these little updates). I don’t really know. I love this site, and I like seeing what we – as a community – have read and reviewed. I like seeing what we gravitate towards, and how varied our opinions are. I do it because it’s interesting – because I think we’re interesting. What the few hundred of us are doing – and what we’ve been doing for a dozen years. We may be a small pebble in the stream, and we may be tilting at windmills – but at least we’ll have the literary chops to get that reference, dammit.
Today (Dec. 30, as I write this), a light bulb went off and I realized I could write a code that could pull all of CBR4 and CBR5 into a Google spreadsheet, and I could then transfer that to my main database. I don’t know why I was able to make this work today, because I used this technique to pull all the reviews from CBR3. Every formula I made for CBR4-5 in the past, however, failed to do what I wanted. But I figured it out, finally. It took five minutes to write the code, maybe an hour to transfer all 279 pages of CBR4 reviews and another for the 340 pages of CBR5, and will probably take a weeks days to re-format it into the main database (update: it took a week to do CBR4, working intermittently – but the formatting isn’t fully done).
It’s a really small thing. But, sometimes, those really small things can make you feel like you’ve uncovered some secret to the universe.
Anyway – on with the stats!
Annual Review totals (2019 totals):
January – 452 (515)
February – 368 (436)
March – 305 (394)
April – 333 (377)
May – 293 (429)
June – 241 (394)
July – 378 (490)
August – 286 (536)
September – 304 (454)
October – 380 (397)
November – 206 (257)
December – 540 (670)
Most popular books of 2020:
t-1. Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (13 reviews, 4.3 average)
t-1. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (13 reviews, 4.6 average)
3. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (12 reviews, 3.9 average)
4. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (11 reviews, 4.0 average)
5. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Tailia Hibbert (9 reviews, 3.7 avearge)
t-6. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (8reviews, 4.6 average)
t-6. The Disasters by MK England (8 reviews, 3.5 average)
t-6. The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow (8 reviews, 4.0 average)
t-9. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins (7 reviews, 3.0 average)
t-10. Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (7 reviews, 4.4 average)
t-10. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (7 reviews, 4.2 average)
Most popular authors:
1. Stephen King (37 reviews): For the second year in a row (and third time overall)
2. Emily St. John Mandel (28 reviews)
3. Brandon Sanderson (27 reviews)
4. Agatha Christie (24 reviews)
5. Seanan McGuire (22 reviews)
6. Rainbow Rowell (21 reviews)
7. Martha Wells (20 reviews)
8. Ben Aaronovitch (19 reviews)
9. Andrzej Sapkowski (17 reviews)
t-10. Jackie Lau (16 reviews)
t-10. Lawrence Block (16 reviews)
t-10. NK Jemisin (16 reviews)
t-10. Talia Hibbert (16 reviews)
Popular genres:
Fiction: 2,052
Fantasy: 26%
Children: 12%
Romance: 19%
Mystery: 22%
Science Fiction: 18%
Graphic Novel: 16%
Young Adult: 12%
Non-Fiction: 618
Biography/Memoir: 33% of nonfiction
Top 10 reviewers: (this count comes from reviews added to the database. This may be slightly different than the official tally)
1. vel veeter (663)
2. BlackRaven (435)
3. narfna (198)
4. Jake (193)
5. andtheIToldYouSos (160)
6. octothorp (139)
7. emmalita (111)
8. Malin (109)
9. CoffeeShopReader (91)
10. pixifer (76)
CBR Database:
38,174 reviews*
18,702+ individual books reviewed
Annual review totals (CBR2-11):
2010. 1,881
2011. 2,335
2012. 3,288
2013. 3,632
2014. 3,061
2015. 3,837
2016. 3,447
2017. 4,146
2018. 4,392
2019. 5,349
2020. 4,086
Annual participant totals:
2010. 95 (15 cannonballs)
2011. 95 (22)
2012. 141 (33)
2013. 148 (31)
2014. 136 (34)
2015. 109 (50)
2016. 122 (41)
2017. 141 (43)
2018. 125 (54)
2019. 135 (72)
2020. 108 (46)
Top 20 Reviewers of All Time: (total reviews; ranking last year)
1. vel veeter (2,401; 1st)
2. BlackRaven (1,474; 5th)
3. Malin (1,344; 3rd)
4. narfna (1,315; 4th)
5. badkittyuno (1,261; 2nd)
6. Jen K (831; 6th)
7. bonnie (783; 7th)
8. Sophia (664; 9th)
9. Caitlin_D (630; 8th)
10. faintingviolet (587; 10th)
11. emmalita (529; 18th)
12. scootsa1000 (529; 12th)
13. Prisco (494; 11th)
14. alwaysanswerb (485; 13th)
15. ElCicco (482; 15th)
16. ASKReviews (473; 14th)
17. Mrs. Julien (430; 16th)
18. Classic (421; 17th)
19. Jake (396; 42nd)
20. Valyruh (364; 19th)
Just outside the top 20: is Caitycat and CoffeeShopReader (364), The Chancellor (360), ingres77 (359), octothorp (356), Travis_J_Smith (353), Halbs (318), and Lisa Bee (301)
Top Books of All Time:
1. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (59 reviews; 4.6 average)
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (53 reviews; 4.3 average)
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (51 reviews; 4.3 average)
t-4. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (48 reviews; 3.9 average)
t-4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (48 reviews; 3.5 average)
t-6. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (45 reviews; 4.1 average)
t-6. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (45 reviews; 4.3 average)
8. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (44 reviews; 3.9 average)
t-9. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell (43 reviews; 4.3 average)
t-9. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (43 reviews; 4.5 average)
Top Authors of All Time:
1. Stephen King (430 reviews; 3.7 average)
2. Neil Gaiman (289 reviews; 4.0 average)
3. JK Rowling (241 reviews; 4.3 average)
4. Rainbow Rowell (222 reviews; 4.3 average)
5. Agatha Christie (175 reviews; 3.5 average)
6. George RR Martin (174 reviews; 3.9 average)
t-7. Margaret Atwood (157 reviews; 4.0 average)
t-7. Suzanne Collins (157 reviews; 3.9 average)
9. Courtney Milan (147 reviews; 4.0 average)
10. Brandon Sanderson (141 reviews; 4.1 average)
*I’ve uploaded all reviews for CBR3-4, and 6-12 that were published on the official blogs. I should get CBR5 completed soon, and then all I’ll have left is CBR1 (which can’t be completed due to not all blogs being up after so long) and CBR2 (which will be somewhat easier to track down, but will still be incomplete).
***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.
Huzzah! I love the stats posts. Thank you for putting it all together!
BRAVO! Honestly, just thinking about what you describe doing makes me feel twitchy and like I’m on the verge of a migraine. Thanks for all the work you put in!!
You’re welcome (to everyone).
It seems like it was less work than everyone thinks it was. I don’t know – I do most of it while I’m watching TV with my wife.
Thank you so much, I love your stat roundups!
YAY! These are always the best- thank you! I wonder who our authors will be this year?
There’s nothing I love more than a good spreadsheet, so I love reading these. Thanks for doing them! It makes me a little sad to see how the numbers dropped so much in 2020 and think about the many reasons people may have been participating less. I know it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of all the other things 2020 took away, but I hope we (Cannonballers, but also just humans in general) are able to find a little more enjoyment in life in 2021.
if it’s any help, after watching literally every single Cannonball come and go, this is the first year I was inspired to sign up! can’t say what it was necessarily, but wanting a better 2021 is definitely up there 🙂
Of course it helps! Glad you’re here!
Yeah, I think everyone struggled a bit to review their books. I think most people were still reading, though – so that’s a good thing.
Thanks for all of the hard work and math (yuck!). It’s great to see the history of CBR laid out like this.
oops 9 of the 19 Aaronovitch entries were me D :
Hey, Malin, I’m coming for your #3 all-time!
Yes, and you will absolutely knock me down another spot. This is why I can NEVER stop Cannonballing. Being the longest-serving reviewer is the only thing I have left.
I love how dramatic this comment is, and how serious you are about it.
I live a very small life, with rather trivial goals. I struggle constantly with anxiety, low self-esteem, unrealistically high expectations of myself and an unobtainable goal of perfection in all things. I fail at so many of the things I set myself to do, so it turns out, I take the Cannonball Read extremely seriously (reviewing like crazy in December to complete my double Cannonball REALLY proved this to me).
Having the most reviews of all time on this site, for a brief glorious period of time, gave me happiness and a sense of achievement. It doesn’t mean that I cry myself to sleep at night because I’m falling further down the most reviews of all time list with every year (I may curse silently about it on occasion, though). I don’t read or review as much as I used to, I was never going to be able to hold the record. And if I have to be knocked down another spot, it’s nice that it’s you doing it, since you’re my book twin.
But as long as I take part every year (even if I only do a quarter Cannonball), I get to keep one silly little record for myself. Is it a bit desperate? Probably, but I don’t care. 🙂
I’ve always been amazed at how consistent and prolific you’ve been on here.
When badkittyuno was the top reviewer every year, I didn’t think anyone would top her. Then vel veeter showed up and just completely smoked everyone. I don’t know if the number of reviews vel veeter puts up every year is the limit of human achievement – but it’s gotta be pretty close.
But being able to come out here every year and consistently review so many books is super impressive to me, at least.
There are a few people on here who I kind of think of as the “rocks” of CBR. If you and narfna weren’t offering your insights every year, I don’t even know that I’d recognize this place.
I don’t think anything about that is desperate! And it’s not wrong to be a little competitive. All these new whippersnappers this year are ahead of me and it’s making me want to go off and read some novellas to get my numbers up.
Also, your reviews are so thoughtful and smart and well put together! I always look forward to reading what you write even when it’s a book I haven’t read or maybe won’t read (it does occasionally happen even if we are book twins). Perfectionism and anxiety are assholes.
And I’m coming for your 4th spot!!!!! 😉
As an almost 40 year old, I promise you I will NOT be trying to learn an instrument this year.
Well, you do read A LOT.
Maybe that’s why I can only do a tenth of what you do – I’m always flitting from one project to another.