I’ve been compiling data on the material I’ve been reading since 2013-ish because… I like data, I suppose is the only reason. I now have enough data for it to look interesting, so I’ve decided to crunch the numbers on the books I’ve read between 1/15/2013 until 10/30/2016. Some of the books that I read and forgot to add at the time, I had to put approximate dates, but I think I got pretty close.
Representation of Authors in My Reading
I also looked at publication dates versus dates I read the books…
The almost perfectly linear sections are where I discovered a series I liked and read all the books in the series (Robin Hobb, Joe Abercrombie, George R. R. Martin, etc). This is because the authors tend to release the books in the series relatively regularly, and I tend to read them at a regular pace. Hence, we get a straight line.
So these days I’m pretty much only reading books published rather recently, it would seem, and almost all were published within my lifetime. I suspect this plot would have been inverted if I plotted the books I was reading in high school – I imagine that reading a book published during my lifetime would have been a rarity back then, but who knows? I did like all my junky sci-fi/fantasy back then, and I remember waiting for the next Star Wars novel to be published (and I remember how stoked I was when the Han Solo trilogy came out). Hmmm.
I guess I’m kind of sad that I didn’t start compiling data on my book reading prior to 2013!
Anyhow, I kind of want to visualize the genres next, but in many cases the genres might end up being a judgement call and of course I would want to handle subgenres (post-apocalyptic sci-fi vs space opera, etc). We shall see if I get anywhere with the genre idea.
Anyhow, here are some other analyses:
Not especially surprising to see an over-representation of the Anglosphere, since I read in English. Maybe I should try to read more non-Americans, though.
And this is *after* I’ve embarked on my conscious effort to read more books by women! Wow, I can’t imagine how this looked before that. Probably the ratio was something like 90% men. The scary thing is, I actually thought I was doing pretty well in this endeavor. Interesting.
Alas, I’m also fairly certain that all the authors were white, but that information is harder to come by for every single author. Outside of looking up every single author and looking at their picture to guess their ethnicity, I don’t know how to find that out. But maybe I’ll have to do something like that, because it seems like a good thing to track in order for me to improve.
2 thoughts on “Books I’ve Been Reading”