A couple more new charts today. First, I’d been wanting to look at the length of the books I was reading. I know I read a lot of pretty short ones, and I was actually a little surprised to note the concentration between 200 and 300 pages. I guess those are your “normal” books but I think of myself either reading novellas or longish stuff that also has a bunch of extra material (e.g., Norton Critical Editions). Check out Mardi at the end there though. Ouch! Mean page length was about 234 and median was 224.
(I should note that this is one of the least scientific of my unscientific graphs; many of these page numbers are taken from Amazon information, which is certainly wrong in places. For example, I discovered that they think all books published by Hesperus are 112 pages long. So yeah.)
I also wanted to take a look at publishers, because I consider myself more aware than average of what publishers I read and often use imprints as a purchasing strategy. I bet if I graphed purchased books by publisher some trends would be even more evident. Below are just the publishers from whom I read at least three books this year. A few things surprised me: the huge disparity between Penguin and Oxford (when I really, really like the newest versions of the Oxford World’s Classics, too); I expected NYRB to come in first; I was surprised at how high Vintage came up; and Grove? (That’s mostly due to my Kirsty Gunn obsession though.) So even though I’m fairly self-aware here my view was still skewed.
Finally, my thematic taxonomy. Before when I made this graph I counted each book in as many categories as seemed appropriate; this time, each got just one theme, and it’s beyond subjective. I went through the list as quickly as possible and tried not to dither over the decisions. The big surprise here is the popularity of the Grail Quest, but that’s what reading a bunch of sea stories will do to you I think. Also, the downfall of Sex & Death, which I think of as much more my style. But I found that was often secondary to the Grail Quest or to Men & Women. Gardening gets a boost from the English Village subcategory of course.
Now this is a cool idea. :)