Introduction

I track my reading on Goodreads. It's a great way to discover new books and have great discussions, and I've gotten into the habit of reviewing the books I read so I can later consult those reviews to refresh my memory. Thanks to Goodreads, I also have access to overwhelming amounts of information about what I've been reading. Here is a small smattering of statistics about books I read in 2010.

2010 by the Numbers

137

books read

0

books discarded

20

books read in April (the most of any month)

3

books read in November (the least of any month)

3.2

my average rating of the 137 books read

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Full Analysis

At 137 books, I averaged about 2.6 days per book, which is about my target. Compared to last year's total (156), you can see what a difference a few books that take a single day or three or four days can make!

Now let's drill a little further into the details.

My best month for quantity was also the best month for quality, and the same is true for worst months—though, with only three books read in November and two of them earning a 1-star rating, that month's a bit of an outlier. I also blame November in general for preventing me from matching the number of books I read in 2009. On the bright side, the overall number of 1-star books I read is down by almost half. So either I had better taste in 2010 or was simply lucky.

We can compare my rating for each book with the average rating on Goodreads:

The data are ordered by date read, so the first data points correspond to the first book I read this year, and the last correspond to the last book I read. As one might expect of average ratings, books I score high tend to do well on average, and books I score low tend to do poorly.

New statistic this year: a breakdown of the books I read by the original publication year (thanks to my friend Claudia for suggesting this). There are 37 distinct years, so the graph is a bit large. There's a thumbnail with embiggening abilities below.

I read many books published in 2009, 2008, and 2010. The last one is interesting considering how large of a backlog I developed this year. The earliest date, 1532, comes from The Prince and Other Writers. While I made a few such forays into the past, it appears that most of my reading material comes from the past ten years.

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Authors, Authors, Everywhere

I read books by 105 distinct authors.

In anticipation of Changes, I re-read the entirety of the Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher. Against my better judgement, I also subjected myself to the tender mercies of Dan Brown. Fortunately, when it comes to reading two books by the same author, I find myself in better company: China Miéville, Karl Schroeder, Neal Stephenson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vernor Vinge.

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Genres

I struggle with how to present a breakdown of genres. The term is a loaded one. Marketing departments love to pigeonhole a book or an author into certain genres, but in terms of reading and criticism, this often encourages snobbery. For instance, I look up my nose at romance. Nevertheless, no analysis of my reading habits would be complete without attempting to divide my books into loose categories. In 2009 I used a pie chart, which has a certain aesthetic appeal but ultimately can't be accurate, since my categories were non-disjoint. This year I have ensured the categories I use are disjoint.

Last year I made a resolution to read 20% non-fiction, and I did not achieve that goal. It's not that I lack for non-fiction books I want to read, but there are just so many more fiction books that show up on my radar. This year I'm aiming for at least a reasonable 10% again.

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Reviews

I wrote 143,417 words about what I read in 2010. This is almost 20,000 more words than 2009, despite reading fewer books. As with 2009, I wrote a review for every book I read. I only wrote 208 words about The Da Vinci Code, because I had already written about a nearly-identical book (Angels & Demons). My longest review, at 2260 words, was for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Here are some phrases I feel are common in my reviews, along with the actual frequency. My most common word was, again, the at 7156 uses. Going down the list in order of frequency, the first non-trivial word is again book, at 803, followed by story (327), characters (235), people (234), plot (162).

I used the word good 208 times but bad only 91 times, and I generalized with overall 10 times. Satisfactory appears 12 times whereas unsatisfactory appears 4 times. I used both kickass and badass 5 times.

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Technical Note

How can I generate such lovely statistics? I exported my books from Goodreads as a CSV file. I imported that file into LibreOffice.org Calc and used that to generate most of the statistics and all of the graphs.

The word count and word frequency analysis of my reviews comes courtesy of TextSTAT, a freeware program created by Matthias Hüning. It's awesome.

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