I still love compiling this post each year. I consult my trusty spreadsheet which has over ten years of basic data on it, and pull out some comparative figures about my year of reading. The top graph is accurate up to yesterday, the others to Boxing Day!
For those of you who don’t like the graphs, I’ve done a few ‘fun’ things at the bottom of the page!
Books and Pages Read
Note the novella effect – a few more books read, about the same number of pages. I’m achieving a consistency here! Interestingly, I appear to have read the most chunksters in 2011 – my average pages per book was at a high of 317 then vs 265 this year.
Year of Publication
No pre-1900 books this year, but I have managed to restrain myself slightly – the percentage of the shiniest newest books published this year is down by 5% to under 50% for the first time in a while.
Source of Books Read
I’ve only kept source stats for three years, but it’s good to see that this year (blue), I read more from my TBR (books in the house before 1 Jan 2018), and also more from my own copies vs review copies. This picture is encouraging, so I shall definitely keep monitoring this statistic.
Author Nationality
This is where authors were born, not which language their books are written in. See my post from a couple of days ago on books read in translation for more info (here). The one continent missing this year is South America – last year I read no books by Asian authors.
Genre / Categories
The only points of note are really that Non-fiction is up, and so are crime/thrillers.
Authors: Women vs Men
I still maintain that I don’t consciously select books to read based on the gender of the author. However my weak trend towards parity continues, even if I was slightly down on the number of women authors read compared with 2016.
Known vs New To Me Authors (yes, it’s the last graph!)
My love of discovering new authors to read continues unabated, but the numbers are showing a trend towards parity – bolstered by reading several Muriel Sparks and a couple of Irish Murdochs etc. – is this a blip or a proper trend – who knows!
Fun, Fun, Fun
Now for a little bit of fun. I scoured the titles of books read this year to pick out a few themes that crop up regularly…
- Animals: Bird, Cat, Cow, Dog, Firefly, Hawk.
- Body parts: Head, Heart, Face, Eye.
- Colours: Red (x2), Orange (x2) + Tangerine, Gold, Blue, Purple, Black, White – our book group largely chose books based upon colours for half of this year.
- Names – Girls: Billie, Daphne, Eleanor, Elsie, Jane, Laila, Poldi. Boys: Alexander, Danny, Georgie, Gustav, Loki, Paddy, Vernon.
- Places: Crewe, England, France, Paris, Reading, Washington, White City, Yukon Shops: Convenience Store, Post Office, Woolworths.
- Occupations: Abbess, Bookseller Italian Teacher, King, Postman, Prince, Singer, Surrealist.
- Weather: A Low and Quiet Sea, Clear Ice-cold January Morning, Cloud, Snow, Wind,
That’s all Folks!
Books of the Year tomorrow.
Nicely done! I don’t know how you create these graphs but I do admire all the details.
Thanks,
Karen
All the data is on a now rather big spreadsheet I’ve been keeping for years. I just sort and plot. Thanks
Some cross-correlation plots would be interesting to see too. Happy New Year when it arrives. Peter
Thanks Dark Puss, and all the best for 2019 to you too. I must think of some ways to liven up my graphs! 😀
Those graphs are fab. I have read very few 2018 publications but that’s not unusual. (Oddly I discovered I was no longer following you, which I was certain I was. So sorry). Looking forward to your books of the year. Writing mine up this evening.
Thanks Ali. No worries about following. I shall look forward to your books of the year too.
I love this and all your stats! I read many fewer 2018 books than you but more than usual since I’ve been contributing to Shiny!
Thanks LIz. We’ll have to find some more Shiny ones for you soon… 🙂
Well, this is quite thorough, Annabel, and impressively beautiful too! It’s always good to be self-reflective, isn’t it, and the fact that you do it must encourage others to consider their quantity and quality of reading too—it certainly does it for me.
Thank you so much for your kind comment. The key is my spreadsheet which now has over 1500 books read on it since 2006! Although I do read a lot of new books – for my own blog and Shiny, I keep plugging away at encouraging myself to read a) more books I already own (not always successful) and b) more widely – particularly translations and NF (more successful), so the spreadsheet and graphs produced from it keep me with one eye on my aims! But I love getting distracted by other good books 😀
I have done stats for several years, so I should definitely compare the years. next time! here is for 2018: https://wordsandpeace.com/2019/01/02/year-of-reading-2018-part-2-statistics/