Having encountered a number of “reading challenges” such as this one, I thought it would be interesting to do some basic analyses on what I read in 2015. Because #nerd.
I like the idea of diversifying my exposure to literature. I like reading books that challenge me. I like reading books that everyone’s talking about. I like reading excellent, gripping fiction. I like reading for personal improvement (spiritually, professionally, etc.).
Goodreads is an excellent tool for tracking what you read, and it is a sorta social network that shows what your friends are reading, too. (Supposing you can get them to use it, that is…) It provides some stats already, but I wish that data were more robust. Maybe I’ll code some tools to help to analyses.
Page Length
Anyway, here’s the distribution of page lengths of the 40 books I read last year:
The median page length was 243 and the average was 273.3. The total pages read was 10,932.
This could use improvement. Longer books tend to lower my average reading pace. I’d like to improve my concentration to tackle bigger books with more zeal.
Publication Date
Here’s the distribution of publication dates (note that I had to remove The Art of War, written somewhere around the 5th century BC, because it rendered a visual graph useless):
The median publication year was 2001 and the average was 1913 (excluding The Art of War: median was 2003 and average was 1975).
I doubt this distribution will change much as I continue reading in the future. I would like to eventually familiarize myself with the classics, but some of them are pretty painful to read. For instance, The Red Badge of Courage, The Art of War, and Heart of Darkness were quite short, but they never really captured me at all and thus became an exercise in persistence and concentration. I can’t imagine what it will take me to get through Great Expectations, let alone Dostoyevsky or Homer.
Genre
I tracked a handful of basic genres or categories of what I read:
| Fiction vs. non-fiction | 21 books vs. 19 books |
| Fantasy/sci-fi | 12 books |
| History/biography | 12 books |
| Classics | 9 books |
| Religious | 8 books |
| War | 6 books |
| Book-to-movie | 6 books |
| War | 3 books |
| Business | 3 books |
| Feminism | 2 books |
Looking at this list, I like the balance. For 2016, I should probably throw in a romance book of some sort, and I really want to learn more about personal finance and retirement planning.
Setting
To the extent that a book mapped reasonably well to a setting, I tabulated the following:
| North America | 11 books |
| Europe | 5 books |
| Asia | 4 books |
| Space | 4 books |
| Africa | 1 book |
This data is definitely useful for my goal of diversifying my literature. I need to read more books taking place outside the US, especially in Africa or even Europe outside the United Kingdom.