As you may have been able to tell, I’ve been feeling a bit scattered lately with my nonthemed reading. Of course, a theme was new for me, and this is how I’ve always read I’m sure. But it is starting to seem so disorganized! I’ll show you, with a scatter plot. This is how I’ve been bouncing from year to year:
I’ve been bouncing around from place to place, too, with biases that seem at a glance to be fairly representative of my historical reading habits:
Is this really what I do when left to my own devices? No wonder I’m always feeling like there are so many holes.
This is excellent. Now how about a bar chart by Overarching Theme (Love, Death, Grail Quest, Gardening, etc.)?
You forgot “English village” which would surely be in the top five.
English Village = subcategory of Gardening
Another good graph, for fiction, would be the Recent Reading distribution of the likability of the main characters – from Extremely Likable to Extremely Unlikable.
Or maybe the distribution of the Scope of Action, with Multi-generational Interplanetary Space Opera at one extreme, and an entire book about a single character who never gets out of bed on the other (e.g., Malone Dies).
It’s possible to view this as a mess but you can also spin it as “varied”. I mean, 1860 closely followed by 1960? A nice 100 years in between to insure you have diversity. Or… not.
And by the way, the use of graphs to show literary thoughts? Brilliant. I might just steal the idea and see if the derivative will show me anything about my reading habits…
I love this! And I’d hate to see what my own graphs would look like – my reading has been all over the place this year. I like AR’s idea of a likeability chart for main characters…
What a great idea! I am going to do this at home. Just to gauge my reading habits.
Wow! This is interesting. I may want to try doing something like this someday. :)