The Decade in Books

There are days when I am thankful that the skills I have learned for my professional career blend so well with my personal hobbies and goals. The last week at work was a learning opportuntity for me because I got free reign to discover not only new ways of visualizing data but also working with the goodreads data that I have been collecting since 2012. This decade in books has been a fantastic journey and it says a lot about how my life has changed as well as how my tastes have progressed.

In this post, I’ll be sharing 2 main infographics – one is about the decade 2010-2019 and the second one is this year – 2019. Without the things that happened in 2019, I don’t think I would even have looked back at the prior years. Hope you have fun looking through these visuals and find some that peak your interest to dig deeper.

A Decade in Books: 2010 – 2019

Overview

From 2010-2019, I read 395 books. That averages to about 40 books a year and looking deeper into how much my reading per year fluctuated, this is an amazing number. I read over 250 different authors from around the world. Though it would have been really cool to look at where those authors originated from, the goodreads data dump was highly lacking in that aspect and I chose not to pursue that direction. The reason the number of books and number of authors do not match up is because I tried out 60 different series in the course of this decade.

Even though I only recently started writing book reviews, looking through this data, I found that I had been sporadically sharing my enthusiasm for some books for a long time. This snippet from the review of Stay by Deb Caletti comes very close to how I still feel about books and write my thoughts about them:

I read books so I can get a glimpse of a better life – something like learn from other’s mistakes. There are times in life when we do the right thing but we keep feeling guilty about it for a long time. Mostly this book is about dealing with that and your own choices. About letting go. There is truth mixed with humour. The truth about fear, will, obsessions and such strong emotions. There were great lines about promises. Things we know but we don’t put into words.

Review of Stay (2013)

I never had a favorite shelf on goodreads, but this year as I mentioned in my reading challenges and goals post, I started to look at books I want to reread. So, I went back and marked all my books and series that I immensely enjoyed as favorites. I am not surprised that that’s only about 10% of the 400ish books I have read this decade.

Books that I want to reread and revisit should be hard to find because if every book I read, I wanted to reread, I would forever be stuck in the cycle of reading the same books, never discovering new ones at all.

Books by Year

Goodreads reduces the reading challenge to just a number and if it’s quantity that dictates reading then that is okay. But books are long, short, difficult to read and sometimes very hard to put down. I had the data for the number of pages (this is an estimate because different editions of books can have different number of pages – hardcovers vs trade paperbacks particularly). A question that comes to mind when I look at these two graphs is what happened in 2012, 2015 and 2019? Did you want to ask the same question?

• In 2012, I finished my first year of my undergraduate degree in Computing Science. That was the first summer when I was free to read whatever I wanted. I actually resolved to read 50 books that summer. As I mentioned in Who are you as a reader? – The Introspection, I was completely reading for pleasure and discovering new challenges and stories.
• Nothing major first comes to mind about 2015 but something did happen in 2014 – I moved to Canada and for the first time, I was earning and able to spend my own money. The move took place in the second half of 2014 and 2015 saw the effects of being able to devour books I wanted and visit the bookstores where Papa and Treena had shopped for me for years. I could never find mangas in India and that is another reason why 2015 saw so much reading – I read a lot of manga that year.
• It’s the end of 2019 now and what happened this year? I finished school and moved into a full-time job! My evening and my mind finally became free of stress and I had all the time in the world to spend on reading, doing things I loved. More on 2019 later.

Isn’t it amazing that reading habits can point to changes in life?

This is my favorite graph of them all – velocity of reading is based on when I started reading a book and I love how steady 2019 has been. The 2012 squiggly line with so many dots between days 150 and 200 represents the summer of 50 books. 🙂

Most Read Authors

Through my partner, Clinton, I was introduced to Terry Goodkind’s Sword of truth series and he is the one author that I have all books for. I read the series in 6 months, reading nothing else alongside it. No wonder I have read so many pages and books for the author.

I mentioned my fascination with mangas earlier, and that was CLAMP. The Tsubasa Chronicles that I grew up watching as an anime is one series I loves reading as a manga.

Another fascinating thing about this graph is George R R Martin – he might not have all the books of Game of Thrones out, but the books I read make up a huge number in pages.

I am only showing the authors that I read more than 3 books for. Can you think of authors that are missing? J K Rowling is not on there with the Harry Potter series – that ended in 2007. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is also pre-2010.

2019 in Books

Overview

2019 is the year when I discovered book blogging. Armed with A Book was supposed to be more about learning but in the course of the changes that happened this year, with me finishing my teaching degree and taking up a data analyst job, I had to find another way to showcase learning on the blog. Books became the conduit for that and I am quite glad that it turned out this way because through book blogging, I have made many new friends and finally have a couple more people to talk to who understand my bookish struggles.

I started reviewing in June and you can see how the number of books I was reading in a month doubled, sometimes in pages as well. It is fascinating to me to see that this extra time that I started putting into reading was going towards studying and career building before. That is a lot of time indeed and I am happy that now I can fill it with books. 🙂

Genres

Erynn asked me in our 2019 in books conversation about the genres that I review and that gave me the idea to show books by genre. I know that some of them can overlap – something can be YA and Fantasy at the same time, but when I categorize, I’m going for the main elements. This year, I have gravitated away from YA and that may be because I feel other genres have a lot more to teach me at this time.

I found so many favorite books this year and I wrote about so many of them on the blog too. When would it be a good time to reread them? I do not know. 🙂

I have thought a lot about reading this year and every single of these pieces of writing have contributed to my perception of reading in 2020. If you have some time, do take a look at these 3 posts and get to know the reader in you.

How was the book? – Describing the Reading Experience

Who are you as a reader? – The Introspection

Who are you as a reader? – The Preferences

Sometimes, between reviewing and the excitment of new books, I forget that I do this because I love reading. Though for 2019, I categorized books into Book blog/review copy and pleasure reading, my hope for the coming decade, 2020 in particular, is to not look at the books I choose to read (and yes, I choose every single one of them – even my family now prefers gift cards for books rather than physical books) as commitments. Every single one of them I look forward to reading, no matter what source they came from.

Here’s to hoping many wonderful conversations with you in 2020 about books and reading. 🙂