Last May, I set a goal: Henceforth, I would read about 30 to 45 books per year, or 10 to 15 per "season" -- the three seasons in my system being January through April (Spring), May through August (Summer), and September through December (Fall). Over the past year, I kept a list of books read, along with pertinent information about each book:
2006-2007 STATISTICS
Total books read: 41 (14 in Summer 2006/16 in Fall 2006/11 in Spring 2007)
Books read per month: 3.42
Books read per week: 0.79
Books read by category:
Literature: 9 (4/2/3)
History: 7 (2/2/3)
Theory and Criticism: 7 (1/3/3)
Misc. Nonfiction: 6 (1/4/1)
Political Science: 4 (1/3/0)
Urban Studies: 4 (2/2/0)
Genre Fiction: 4 (3/0/1)
Books read by publisher:
All trade and non-UP academic: 27 (13/6/8)
All university press: 14 (1/10/3)
Penguin: 6
Vintage: 5
Penn Press: 5
Norton: 3
Chicago: 3
Cornell: 2
Random House: 1
Pelican: 1
Harper & Row: 1
Mariner: 1
Viking: 1
Verso: 1
Knopf: 1
Westview: 1
Modern Library: 1
New Directions: 1
Ace: 1
Continuum: 1
Monthly Review: 1
Princeton: 1
Yale: 1
Harvard: 1
MIT: 1
Books read by binding:
Cloth: 15 (36.59%, 3/8/4)
Paperback: 26 (63.41%, 11/8/7)
Duration in possession before read:
Less than one month: 30 (7/14/9)
One month to six months: 5 (3/0/2)
Six months to one year: 1 (1/0/0)
More than one year: 5 (3/2/0)
There's something pleasing about rendering reading in terms of numbers and categories. To be sure, part of the pleasure comes from violating the unspoken taboo against treating reading as a quantifiable activitity (Full disclosure: Moneyball was one of the 41 books I read last year). But making this list also helped me reflect on what I've read, and why, and how my reading habits are changing over time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Two observations:
1) Your denial of winter as a 'season' (for reading at least) reveals the San Diego beneath your cold, Philly exterior. It says something else too, but I'm not sure what.
2) If Urban Studies is a category, Sports should be one as well. Perhaps they were constituted by critical mass (you don't want a category with fewer than three books-- that's just silly), but based on the Moneyball aside, I'll guess that at least three of the Misc. Non-fiction were Sports related. Unless they've been split between Poly Sci and Genre Fiction.
Post a Comment