2010 Reading Statistics or How We've Been Reading

This is always one of the most fun parts of the year for me.  I love looking through what I've read and remembering the good and the bad, seeing how well I achieved loose goals and deciding what I want the next year of reading to look like.

I'm finishing up my last book of the year right now and so, after this one, I will have finished 125 books totalling 38102 pages.  That's an average of 104 pages a day.  That's down from 125 pages a day last year.  This makes sense because I am spending more time volunteering at the school than last year and also more time at the gym.  I also spend more time helping with homework and satisfying the strange demands of a six year old.  I don't have any goals for how many books I want to read next year but 100 is a nice number to pass!

Last year I read six non-fiction books and set an informal goal of reading twelve this year.  Well, I ended up only reading 7 non-fiction titles for the year.  Not as good as I had hoped but at least it didn't go down!  I will set the same loose goal of twelve for next year.  I have some great titles on my shelves that I need/want to read.  I think that if I get through Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, though, it should count for more than one (832 pages)!

I marked 10 books as "definitely would not read again".  That's half the number from last year which makes me very happy!  As I am being more selective in my review copies and reading more books from my own shelves, I'm hoping this number will be even lower next year.

45 of my books were borrowed from the library.  That's 36 percent, or just over one-third.  I anticipate it being lower in the coming year as I will be trying to choose mainly from the reads already in my house.

One thing I started tracking last year was how many authors I read for the first time.  It appears to be 71 authors of novels plus an unknown number from two short story collections.  This isn't far from last year's number and means I'm being fairly good about trying out new authors.

This year I decided to start tracking the year of publication on the books I read.  The oldest books I read were Sense and Sensibility (1811) and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).  71 percent of my reads were published in the 2000's.  I hope this will change next year when I read more from my shelves.  I would like to have it be closer to 50 percent.

Next year I think I will also record if a book is translated.  I think that 11 of my reads from this year were originally written in another language including French, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew and Japanese.

One way my reading drastically changed this year was that I only read two books over 600 pages long (Outlander and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).  This is quite surprising now that I look back and I definitely intend to change it going forward.  I love "chunksters" and think I passed them up for the sake of the blog this year.  I'm not sure how many I have on my shelves but I'm sure it's in the dozens so I just need to pick them up!

I had 6 re-reads this year -- three from Tolkien, two from Diana Wynne Jones and one from J.K. Rowling.

32 of my reads were ARCs or review copies and 16 of my reads were for read-alongs, group discussions or special events (like DWJ Week and NYRB Spotlight Month).  I don't think I'll sign up for any challenges this year (except for RIP, of course, and DWJ Week if it's now an annual event ... which it had better be) but instead I'll choose things to participate in reading events as they come up.  I still might make some reading lists for challenges that I'm interested in.

A personal challenge I set up for myself this year was to read books and plays that inspired my favorite classic movies.  I got to four of them this year--The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Sabrina Fair, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Laura--and happily they all made me love my favorite movies even more!  In the coming year I hope to read Strangers on a Train and The African Queen among others.

As you may have noticed, Z's reading calendar fell by the wayside about halfway through the year.  It was hard to keep up with and he lost interest in it.  Not to mention the fact that I physically lost it.  It ended up stashed somewhere and I haven't seen it for a while now.  We'll have to see if we can't think of another way to record what he is reading in the coming year.

So that's it!  I'm looking forward to 2011 and all of the books it holds in store for us.  If you have any reading suggestions or requests about the blog, please let us know any time!

Happy New Year,
K and Z