Ahem.
I set myself a modest goal to read 100 books in 2012. I read 163. You can check out my Goodreads profile for a list, if you like.
One hundred sixty three books. That's pretty awesome. Most of the books were graphic novels, which go pretty quickly, but still. That's a lot of reading. And I'm not even up to the level of some of the other Cybils panelists. According to the Goodreads stats machines, that is 32332 pages I put in front of my eyeballs this year, and this doesn't include the hundreds of pages of articles and essays I read in the spring as finished up grad school or the hundreds of pages of blogs I read each week. I also managed to watch a lot of TV. I'm a voracious consumer of media, and I suspect I'm not all that special. I mean, my mom thinks I'm special, but she's required to by state law.
Anywhoosies. The NUMBERS!
BY GENRE
I struggle with how to label books, especially because many of the graphic novels I read weren't actually novels. They were nonfiction -- memoirs and biographies and the like. I linked to this article by Dylan Meconis a few months ago about how to review graphic novels. The article brought up the point that comics are the medium, not the genre. Still, this year, I listed all comic format books as graphic novels in my tally since I read that article back in like October and didn't want to redo my charts. I may go back and make a change in 2013, since I also lump all non-fiction into one category but split fiction into juvenile, young adult and adult fiction into their own categories. It's sloppy data keeping, but it's what I have.
As you can see, graphic novels have jumped the most. The colors represent the years I've been keeping track. Blue is 2009, red is 2010, yellow is 2011 and green is 2012. I made these graphs in Google docs and haven't figured out how to use all the features yet. New Year's Resolution!
BY MONTH
I started keeping track of my reading by the month in 2010 to see if my reading habits change with the season. I tended to taper off in the winter since I spent more time watching movies and crafting. Obviously 2012 has been a wacky year with the Cybils reading, so it will be interesting to see if my habits return to their previous ways in 2013 (or if I get to be a Cybils panelist/judge again).
There are many more ways I could parse this data. I might go back and compare male/female authored books, books with LGBT content, books with female/male protags, etc, to see how diverse my reading has been. I KNOW it's been pretty white, but I wonder what else the data might show. Another New Year's Resolution, perhaps?
Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful New Year! Happy Reading!
Wow. I clearly need to be more scientific about tracking my reading habits.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I salute you on your book count! It totally blows my 126 books for the year out of the water.
Hi. Glad I found your blog through the Mother Reader challenge. You're a woman after my own heart. I also tracked my reading last year and made an infographic about it (Books I Read in 2012). I got a lot of books on my list, but that's because I included picture books and kids books too.
ReplyDeleteI didn't include my picture books because most of the time I read them at work. Hands down, the thing I miss most having moved from youth to adult services is seeing all the new picture books.
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