What I read
10 years ago, I started keeping a list of the books I read. I’ve kept that list going, and recently attempted the crazypants task of compiling all of those lists into one big huge spreadsheet so that I could analyze my reading trends. I’m kind of dorky like that. I love a good spreadsheet.
I found some interesting, (some random) things. (All of this is as of the end of Dec. 2012.)
Between Jan 2003 and Dec 2012 I read 806 books.
592 (73%) were fiction, 214 (27%) were non-fiction.
34% were literary fiction, 13% were mysteries. 6% were biographies, 7% were about parenting. The rest were a mix of all different categories.
111 (13%) were re-reads- 37 books reread. ( I realize this doesn’t make sense, but I can’t think how to explain it. I read 37 individual books that I had either read before or that I reread again afterward, some of them multiple times, for a total of 111 books.)
My most reread books were:
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (4 times)
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (3)
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (3)
Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlife by David Eagleman (3)
The Royal Tenebaums by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (3)
Have You Seen the Horizon Lately by Jamie S. Rich (3)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (3)
My most read authors were:
Agatha Christie (23 books)
Kerry Greenwood (17 books)
and Steven Brust (17 books).
In my never ending question of who I love more-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or Evelyn Waugh- Waugh took the lead with 9 books read or reread, Fitzgerald had 5, Hemingway had 5.
On average I read the most books in June and December, and I read a higher percentage of non-fiction books in February, March, and May. I read the least non-fiction in December.
After I’d played with the spreadsheets a while, I started looking at weirder and weirder things- and started to find really weird things. For example:
I read more half of the Agatha Christie books in December. (2005, 2012)
The 3 Joe Hill books I have read, I read in February. (2007, 2008, 2010.)
I read F. Scott Fitzgerald in March. (2003, 2005, 2008, 2012)
I Â read Oscar Wilde in May.(2004, 2005, 2006, 2012)
I read Shakespeare in August.(2010, 2011, 2012)
I’m sure I could discover all kinds of weird and random things, but that’s all I’ve got for now.
Happy reading!