Saturday, December 31, 2011

2011 Reading Stats

Since I track my reading in GoodReads, I am more than happy to use their widgets and statistic analysis to look at what I've read this past year.  I'll post a little later with my favorites of the year.  I just can't help myself, I love to look at the numbers!

View clickable version here

In my head, I rate most books at a 3, but the statistics show that I actually give most books a 4. Books have to be truly great to get a 5. As I've been reflecting back on the year, it is interesting to me that some of the books I now call my favorites of this year were not necessarily those with the most number of stars. It just goes to show you that how I rate books is flawed, or at the very least subjective.


Possibly the most interesting bit of data to me was to see that I'd managed to read around 15,000 more pages this year than in 2010. I have no idea how or why. I like to look at pages vs. books, because what if I read stacks of poetry vs. a few mighty tomes? Regardless, I read a lot this year.

I feel like I should say that to me, saying I read 197 books is misleading. In the list I keep for myself in Google Docs, I show a nice round 175. The disparity is probably from accidentally leaving off a few, but most likely from not including cookbooks in my own count. I review a fair number every year, usually baking in theme. You can view that list over here. It is a fun list because I list everything two ways - chronologically and then by category, something I don't always bother with in GoodReads. Anything in italics is a re-read. This year I grouped all non-fiction into one category (excluding cookbooks), but some years I separate that out.

There is a lot more analysis I could do that I will spare you on.  It would be interesting to know how much of these are audio, since I listened a lot more this year, which are eBooks, and which were read for book clubs vs. on my own.  I also feel like I read a lot more new books than I did other years.  GoodReads does graph that, but it is just a blue blobby showing a concentration in the 21st century.

2 comments:

  1. fantastic! I cannot use it for me, because I keep bumping into books I read in French decades ago, and add them as read, and that would not work for my real stats of the year. so here is my manual wrapup: http://wordsandpeace.com/2011/12/30/year-of-reading-2011/

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  2. Oh yeah that's why I created a separate Read2011 shelf, so I could run stats specific to each year's actual reading. I should just keep the cookbooks off of it, and then I wouldn't have to keep two separate lists!

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