I’ve always been drawn to the “quantified self” movement. Of course, being attracted to an idea has never once given me the discipline to actually implement that idea.
Goodreads, however, has been a notable exception. I began consistently logging my reading sometime in 2011 which means, to my surprise, I now have about a solid decade of “quantified self” data (albeit of a limited scope). So let’s see if there’s any signal amidst this noise.
Total books read: 516
This averages 43 books per year. About a book every 9 days. My reaction? “Yeah. That checks out.”
Speaking of things that check out:
The top five genres were:
- Fantasy (172 books; 33% of books read)
- Science Fiction (76; 15%)
- Essay/Biography (55; 11%)
- Philosophy/Improvement (52; 10%)
- Politics/Reporting (38; 7%)
Audiobooks took a decisive win as my preferred vehicle:
When looked at as “audiobook share of consumption over time, the difference is even more stark: from 2012-2014, audiobooks were ~60% of my book consumption. By 2020, they were consistently 80%+.
I was a bit surprised to find so few re-reads:
Those are mostly just raw numbers, though. Some more interesting insights came when I looked at trend developments over time.
Trends
Books read per year were pretty consistently in the range of high 40s to mid-60s, with the stark exception of 2012. Why was that so low? Oh right: Sarah lost her vision in the first half of the year, and we had a newborn in the second half of the year.
An interesting aside here is that there was more than one year in this period when I resolved to read less. I felt like I wasn’t retaining books that I’d consumed; that I was reading just to ‘unlock an achievement’ (which doesn’t exist). The irony is that (as you can see) most years hovered around the same number of books read. So you’re seeing a couple of failed New Year’s resolutions here.
Slicing things up by month is fun(?), but doesn’t really prompt anything other than a vague “what’s up with Marches and Junes?”
No punchline to finish with. Just a snapshot of my ~30s through the lens of books.