2016: A Review of a Year in Books

A few years ago, I came across a blog post where someone (I honestly have no idea who it was now, or I would link to it!) had kept track of what they read in Excel and used it to make little graphs to see stats on their reading for the year. I love that kind of stuff, so I bounced off their idea and created my own categories, just for my own curiosity.

I kept it up again this year, and decided to make my own graphs just to visually view the types of reading I had done over the course of 2015.

If you're curious, here they are!

Sort of an unspoken goal for me this year was to read more books by female authors than by male authors. This wasn't really a big goal, since I think a good story is a good story, no matter the gender of the author, but I was pleased to see I succeeded in my goal.
It's also interesting looking at the break down of the main character's gender. Some books (such as books of essays) don't have main characters, so those fall under the n/a and if a book has multiple viewpoints from both male and female perspectives I categorize them under "multiple" but overall it's a fairly balanced pie, with a definite leaning toward female main characters.

For this chart, standard means just the standard type of text format that most books are. Mostly I was curious about the other types of books I was reading.
And then of course, a look at the format in which I read them. I listen to audiobooks in my car, but didn't hit as many this year as I usually do. 13 of those were also from the Series of Unfortunate Events, so that accounts for most of the audiobooks I listened to this year.

 Although many books don't fit into hard and fast age ranges, they do tend to be marketed toward a particular age group. These are based on either where they tend to be sold in a bookstore, or my own perception (especially for the New Adult category).

This is the chart that intrigued me the most. I apologize for the fuzziness - I've tried a couple times, and can't seem to get it to render any more clearly. Anyway, I was shocked to see that I read more contemporary books than anything else this year, but looking back at the last couple of years I can see that, it's not that I read more contemporary (it's pretty equal with the last two years), but that I diversified in my other reading, spreading it out. These categories are also completely subjective to me, so a book I labeled as paranormal, someone else might have labeled fantasy. I just like creating fairly specific categories for myself. I also self-define some of them (such as magical realism, which I attached to books that had magical elements, but were set in a contemporary world).

Just out of curiosity, I like to see what different narrative styles I come across (a lot of non-fiction falls under the n/a category). The thing I found most intriguing this year, was how many books I read that had a mix of narrative styles, such as a book in both 1st and 3rd person.

 I still tend to rate books high, but I don't have a problem with that. I tend to round up (so if I give a book a 3.5, I'll make it a 4 star on GoodReads). But that also means that if I give a book 1 or 2 stars I really REALLY didn't like it.

 And finally, looking at page ranges. I read almost 52,000 words total (at least according to GoodReads and my own calculations), but this breaks it down for me a little more and I can see that I read quite a quantity of books with a fairly low page range. I don't think longer books are better, by any means, but I can see that a 50 page graphic novel will probably take less time to read than a 300 page novel. So it's just interesting to see it play out this way.

I can't say I'm planning on making any specific changes to my reading style based on these numbers, but I do find it really fascinating to look at my reading habits in a more graphic (pun intended) way :)

My Reading Year in Review

Yesterday I was reading Sarah Enni's review of her read books from 2013, and I thought that it would be interesting to do something like that for myself. I put together some different categories based on what I was personally interested in knowing about the books that I read, threw all the data into Excel and started playing with pie charts (so much fun)(yes I am a nerd).

And since I spent more time doing this than I would probably want to admit, I thought I would share my findings with all of you.

Before you look, I do want to make a couple of qualifiers:

1. This is very subjective. I assigned the genres, etc. as I saw that they fit, so a book I listed as a fantasy someone else might stick in another genre. And with many of the graphic novels I decided whether they were 1st or 3rd person based on my perception if it wasn't really obvious.
2. The "special format" chart is just based on my curiosity of some of the different formats. Graphic Novels are all different genres and geared toward different ages, so I was curious to see how many I read, but didn't want to take away from listing them as fantasy or contemporary or whatever.
3. For the Focus Age chart I broke it down into Kids (picture books or board books), MG (middle grade, chapter books, kind of 6ish-12ish years old), YA (teen), NA (New Adult (college or early 20s - the book either self-identified as such or that I perceived as belonging in this category), and Adult (anything else). Again this is based on my personal perspectives. I listed the Buffy graphic novels as Adult, though they could be considered either YA or NA, etc.
4. If there were multiple authors all of the same gender (such as CLAMP) I just listed them as that gender. Same with main characters. If there was more than one author of different genders I listed it as multiple (same with MCs) and with some of the graphic novels if there were multiple authors but it was clear that one was the major creator sometimes I just listed it under that one. Like I said in 1 - very subjective.

So this year I read 190 books, so there was a lot of data to compile. I've decided to keep a chart like this going over the next year so I can do this again without it taking as long.

If you're still curious after all this rigmarole here come the pie charts!

I did learn some interesting things about my reading and confirmed other things that I already knew. Like I read mostly fiction - I am now determining to try to read a little bit more non-fiction this year to broaden my tastes a bit. For genres Fantasy definitely took 1st place, which wasn't a surprise. But I read a lot more contemporary fiction than I thought and not as much historical fiction as I thought. I would like to balance these out just a bit, but I love me some fantasy and dystopian so this probably won't change a whole lot this year, and I'm perfectly fine with that. The genders of authors and main characters was about what I expected. I thought I had a bit of a nice balance in both, though I think I'd like to read more books from male perspectives since I always struggle writing the male voice and another goal I have is to work on revising my WIP, which alternates between a male and a female.

Overall I found this an interesting exercise just to see what my reading habits are. I keep track of books on GoodReads (which is amazing and you should totally be on it if you aren't), but to see them broken down this way is quite intriguing.