I read a lot. I can relate to what Zadie Smith says in her piece on being addicted to reading:
Can I really not manage a brief subway ride without textual support? Is that normal? Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, Wish I had all that time to read?
Like in previous years, I kept track of the books I read in my calendar. This doesn’t only satisfy my need for collecting data but also helps whenever I’m looking for a book to include on a syllabus, or when people ask me whether I’ve read ‘anything good lately’. This year
my boyfriend used my list of books to visualize what I read by means of a number of infographics.
Compared to previous years, 2015 was a pretty standard year book-wise. I read 83 books in total (not including academic books/secondary literature), with a total of 29,078 pages. Apparently, I read about 80 pages a day. Since I usually read around an hour to 1 1/2 hours a day, that sounds about right.
Since I keep track of when I finish a book, I can also tell when I read a lot. Looks like December was an especially good month. Surprisingly, I don’t read that much on vacation. I had brought along
Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire on vacation in June. It took me relatively long to finish – which has less to do with the book, which I loved, and more with all the fun I had on road trips and sightseeing.
Sometimes, my book-average is low in a certain month because I spent my time reading a very long book. That’s the case in April, as the infographic below (
interactive version) shows. I reread
Middlemarch which I enjoyed, but it took a lot of time. Whenever I’m especially busy with teaching or research, I don’t get a lot of time to read, and when I do, it’s usually related to research or teaching.
The
infographic below also shows which books I read for pleasure, for teaching or for research. Pleasure and research tend to overlap: as a contemporary literature scholar, basically everything contemporary I read is also a way of keeping up to date with my field. I decided to mark as ‘research’ only those books that were explicitly tied in with a paper, chapter or research project.
That I read more contemporary books than books published before 2000 shows as well. From the infographic below (
interactive version), it becomes clear that the vast majority of what I’ve read in 2015 was also published in 2015.
I was also curious about the gender balance of the books I read. Following a book-club read (
Ann Morgan’s Reading the World) I wanted to see the countries of origin of the books. My hunch was that I had started to read more nonfiction in 2015, so the books are also split into ‘genre’ – being in this case either fiction or nonfiction.
Click the image for an interactive infographic.The size of the bubbles reflects the number of pages per book.
I read mostly British authors, followed by American authors. I didn’t read anything in translation in 2015, which means that I read primarily English books written in English, and a few German and Dutch books in the original. It surprised me that the gender balance is pretty equal: I’ve read slightly more books by female authors, but the difference is slim. This wasn’t a conscious decision, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless. Books read for pleasure far outrank those rank for teaching research (although there’s some overlap, as I discussed above). Fitting with my interest in an research on post-2000 literature, the majority of books I read in 2015 were also published in 2015.
The full list of books I read in 2015 is here. I’m also keeping track on this site what I’m reading in 2016.
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