I'm not the first to do this. Adam over at The Wertzone has listed his reading statistics for 2010 so far, and I thought I would join him for interest value.
Since the start of the year I've read 50 books (as of about 21:58 this evening, when I wrapped up the third Dresden book). Wow. I thought I was hovering somewhere in the late 30's, so that has really surprised me!
For interest value, I firstly counted how many of the books belonged to me and how many were review copies from publishers:
My own: 35
Review copies: 15
(This isn't that surprising to me since in the first couple of months of the year I wasn't really receiving any review copies! I'm sure that figure will even out in the latter half of the year, although I'm equally sure I'll still buy and read books of my own).
This is how the years were split:
1996: 1 book
1998: 1 book
1999: 2 books
2002: 1 book
2004: 5 books
2006: 3 books
2007: 3 books
2009: 10 books
2010: 21 books
Alright, that is a little more depressing. I am definitely of the 'new shiny' mentality! And how sad that the earliest published book I've read this year is 1996! Time to start injecting a few classics into my reading material, methinks!
Here is the publisher split:
Orbit Books: 11 books
Gollancz: 8 books
Headline: 7 books
Hodder Children's Books: 5 books
Harper Voyager: 3 books
Black Library: 3 books
Pan Macmillan: 3 books
Black Swan: 2 books
Michael Joseph: 1 book
Century: 1 book
Angry Robot books: 1 book
Penguin: 1 book
Atom: 1 book
Sourcebooks Fire: 1 book
Coronet Books: 1 book
Faber & Faber: 1 book
The dominance of Orbit, Gollancz and Headline are no real surprise to me - after all, I am a reader of speculative fiction and the first two are certainly the heavy hitters in the publishing arena for this genre. Headline is a publisher I love because they actually publish the spectrum of books I am interested in, including chick lit, quirky YA and historical fiction as well as some speculative (hence the high number of books I've read from them).
I admit that I am not the most up to speed with the various imprints of the major publishers: I guess Atom could have gone in with Orbit, since they are both Little Brown, for instance, but I just decided to list out whatever the publisher was on the spine of the books!
EDIT: Gender split (authors):
Male: 19 authors
Female: 31 authors
I believe that this split is skewed in favour of female authors because I've read a bit of chick lit, a fair amount of YA and some urban fantasy - all of which are generally the province of women rather than men. When I looked at the fantasy/sci fi section the dominance moved over to men rather than women.
This little exercise has actually shown me that:
a) I'm on target for 100 books (and hopefully more) this year
b) I desperately need to increase the number of older books I am reading and stop being distracted by the new shiny releases!
Please feel free to list your own stats in the comments section, or provide a link back to your blog if you choose to join in!
Thursday, 27 May 2010
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I've just started out, so I've only reviewed three books:
ReplyDeleteTwo from Harper Voyager
One from Tor UK
But I bet none can beat my 100% of the books reviewed have gay central characters statistic.
-Very interesting Amanda, and a thank you to Adam for starting this.
You should be proud of that statistic, Ole! *grin* I genuinely don't think anyone will get close :-p
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to do a full year-by-year breakdown or the publisher breakdown (since I'd have to list probably 2-3 dozen publishers at least), but I will note that out of 164 books completed, 15 were 2009 (re)releases and 21 were 2010 (re)releases. I have balance :P
ReplyDeleteLarry, I'm going to start forbidding you from making comments on my blog - you put me to shame :-p
ReplyDeleteI put a lot of people to shame. Me? I'm just shameless ;)
ReplyDeleteGeez, That's a little over a book a day since January... For myself I usually read between 30 to 50 books a year. I'm at 20 (a couple audio-books in there) now, so I'm on track. I physically don't have time to read any more than that. I'm also a slow reader. All but 3 were review copies so far. All but those 2 were published in 2010, or soon to be published in 2010.
ReplyDeleteWow, and I thought the fact that I've read 32 books so far was a feat! I have no idea to the publishers I've read but I've only read 1 2010 book so far (Salute the Dark by Tchiakovsky). I have read 21 fantasy books, 3 non-fiction, 5 historical fiction and 3 general fiction books.
ReplyDeleteAnd no one can keep up to Larry :)
Jennifer
From my Goodreads records - without counting rereads and non-available-in English books - I finished 113 books so far in 2010, of which 44 were review copies and 69 independently acquired ones (bought, library)
ReplyDeleteAs reviews go for 2010 at least 50 full ones of single books split about evenly between arcs and independently acquired, but in addition I've done series reviews, stories reviews, capsule reviews...
I've read 87 2010 books - some of them in 2009 though - so definitely the largest concentration is 2010 releases. But I've read some 1990's novels too though no older so far this year with the English editions caveat since I've reread some old favorites of mine from the 60's, 70's and 80's but in Romanian.
The one statistic that needs improvement is gender distribution since I read only 22 books by women authors which is less than the minimum 25% I would like to see...
As publishers it's tricky since I am not that familiar with the structure of the conglomerates beyond googling a specific publisher and see if/which major house it belongs to like say Orbit is Hachette, Daw is Penguin, Tor is Macmillan and so on, but as imprints go, the usual suspects, Tor, Baen, Pyr, Gollancz, Orbit, Tor.uk, Solaris, Subterranean, Bantam, Daw... lead
@Jeff - It scares me when people say things like 'that's a little over a book a day'. I don't do maths like that and so it opens my eyes to how many books I actually read when other people do the maths!
ReplyDelete@Jennifer - that sounds like a healthy spread! I now want to work on a better spread of my reading, because I feel I've confined myself a little bit.
@Liviu - Wow, that is some reading! You're another one I might have to ban from my blog ;-). I like the idea of looking at gender distribution. I am going to edit my post to add that in!
From my my records I have read 60 books 2010 and 19 of them by female authors which is 32%, a number I am satisfied with. My goal is to read 10-20 books a month and write about them. I am about 10 books after when it comes to reviews and this month it will be less than 10 books read.
ReplyDelete2 books are review copies the rest bought by me or was free for download.
I have no statistics of publishers. Maybe I should ...
Impressive numbers there @Liviu
Good initiative Amanda and Adam.
Thanks for leaving a comment Ove - I've particularly been enjoying your focus on female protagonists in recent blog posts. Oh! And this initiative is all Adam; I just stole it :-) (with credits!)
ReplyDeleteEeesh, no idea how many I've read, and slightly scared to find out to be honest. One of the reasons I started a book club on the podcast was I know I have gaps in my reading knowledge. I know a little about a lot of classics but have never got around to reading them and am now trying to make amends. So in the last year of doing the bookclub, we've read books as old as Fahrenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse 5, to newish ones like American Gods, to shiny new ones like Empire in Black and Gold. Next up is Stranger in a Strange Land. Again, a total classic, that I just missed out on because I was probably too busy reading Eddings and Brooks at the time!
ReplyDeleteLarry> Damn you and your superior reading totals, I ridicule your attempts to pick up women! :D
ReplyDelete63 at the moment, I'd say less than a dozen of those were from 2009/2010, quite a few oldies.