all the books

[usuallyhats]

lizbee did a books of the year post with graphs and things, and I thought "that's a great idea! I should steal take inspiration from that!"

This year I read 128 books, 150 graphic novels, and four novellas (all Vorkosigantastic), spread more or less evenly across the year:



Not sure what happened in September though, or indeed why I just typed "Septermberm" instead.



No surprises there: SF/Fantasy dominates, especially when you consider that most of the spinoffery and children's/YA stuff I read could fall into that category too. (It was boosted by my reading ALL the Vorkosigans, though.) I wanted to read more non-fiction this year than last, but I really didn't. It looks less bad when you take out all the stuff I read for my Masters last year, but then this year most of the non-fiction I read was about either Doctor Who or Shakespeare, so not much diversity there either... Maybe I will pinch borrow some of the interesting looking things The Father got for Christmas this year and last?



I divided the things I read by author gender to see if I do read as many books by female authors as I think I do; it turned out pretty much as I expected, about half and half.



Then I broke it down a bit more, by genre too. No surprises there either, I think. (The dominance of books by female authors in SF/Fantasy is largely because I read so much by Lois McMaster Bujold...)

Comics!



I think this graph shows my biases fairly obviously.



I broke the comics I read this year down by whether they were male, female or mixed-gender team led and was a bit surprised to see comparatively few female led titles, so I looked at last year's too:



Basically, I read all the ones with women in them last year, and had to cast my net a bit wider this year... (I also didn't count rereads, which would probably have boosted the female led numbers.)



Also, breaking it down a bit more, a lot of those male led comics were Batman ones, a non-zero amount of which I read for reasons of a Batgirl nature...

On the off chance that anyone wants to see everything I read this year, here is a link to the relevant Google Doc. (Disclaimer: not a recs list, just a list of all the things I read all the way through this year.)

Comments

[cosmic_llin]

Crikey, and I thought I'd done well! This is fascinating! :)

[usuallyhats]

:D Glad they are interesting to someone other than me! ;) (Apparently my response to stress is "read everything in sight". I'm not sure why I'm surprised about that...)

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

Heh. Those graphs are very, very nifty. I'm almost tempted to make a similar set of shiny graphics, but I read woefully few books in 2012, and mostly more or less trashy crime fiction, so the breakdown would look a bit depressing. ;)

[usuallyhats]

I do love graphs! Sadly Excel '97 doesn't make them as pretty as they could be...

Heh, if I hadn't cheated and excluded comics from the top set of graphs, they would look very different! :)