Reading by Genre 2013

Here's the breakdown by genre of what I read this year:

Average Length of Books Read

Most books I read, it appears, run to about three hundred pages, and perhaps I'm dumbing down, since the books seem to be getting shorter. (That said, I started this year with a book that was over one thousand pages, and Good Reads, from which I got my statistics ranked it as zero pages, so my page-count numbers may be less than accurate.)

Authors Read by Gender

A recent chart caused me to ponder how many books I read by men versus women (anthologies are not included). Here are the results year by year, by number and then by percent. It was pretty much as I figured--men dominate.

Favorite Book of the Year

Each year since graduating from college, I've chosen a favorite book of the year in three categories (novel, story collection, nonfiction) and then a single favorite overall. How it breaks down follows. I was surprised by how many story collections there are compared with the other types of books--I do love story collections; it should also be noted, however, that most of those collections were chosen in the years very soon after graduate school. In more recent years, nonfiction seems to more often come out on top. I was also surprised by how many women authors wrote my favorite book of each year; there are still significantly more men, but I'd have thought the numbers would have been even more skewed, since the number of books I read by men seems to be fairly skewed--and probably to an even greater proportion (I see another chart in the making). Anyway, here are the charts:

By Type of Book

By Author's Gender

Authors I've Read the Most Books By

This list is somewhat unscientific, as I don't have a way to track books I've read more than fifteen years ago, except by memory. So I looked at authors on my shelf, thought a bit about authors missing from my shelf, looked at the works on their various "also by" lists and came up with the following. This lists only those authors who I've read more than five books by. (Apologies to authors of only four books, such as Salinger and Hemphill and West--I've read all I can. Apologies also to a few fine writers who come close such as Richard Ford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Milan Kundera, Jay McInerney, Kate Braverman, and Julio Cortazar. And finally, apologies to screenwriters playwrights, such as Sam Shepard and Woody Allen--I've read three collections of Shepard's plays, as well as a screenplay, but in the end, I wasn't sure whether to consider the collection as a book or each individual play as a book; I went with the former; with Allen, I've read three screenplays, in one bound volume, and his three books of "stories.")

Penguin and Random House Merger

So Penguin and Random House are planning to merge, which I think is utterly insane. Why? Because my feeling is that they publish the bulk of the books in this country. There are two of what are called the "big six" (or is it five?) publishers. But in fact, they are the two biggest--or that would seem the case to me. I decided to take a look at my own bookshelf and see what percentage of the books are from these two companies. Here's how a random shelf of nonfiction books (since I work for a university press, I decided to include that as part of the percent too):

Here's how it looks for fiction:

Nearly half! Seriously, the best fiction generally is being published by these two companies; HMH and Harper both publish their share, but it's nowhere near to the amount that RH and Penguin do. I hope, but I doubt, that antitrust will keep this merger from going through.

The argument these companies will make--and it's not necessarily unjustified--is that they now, in the digital age, have to compete with media giants like Amazon and Apple, who will increasingly create their own content and/or dictate price schedules. Being bigger gives these two publishers more leverage, but what of the little guys? Will the heft of a bigger publisher translate to better/fairer deals for small presses too, or will it simply mean that one has to be big to play?

Books Ratings Each Year

It appears that some years I am a softee (e.g., 2011), and in other years I find nearly nothing absolutely stunning (this being one of those years). In all years, I end up at least liking or finding passably good most books I read, which makes sense, since I'm the one who selects them. Here are how many books received each star rating by each year (2012 isn't complete yet, though), with five being "loved," four being "liked," three being "okay," two being "didn't like," and one being "hated":

And here is how it looks as a percent:

Longest Books Read by Year

Using my handy-dandy GoodReads stats, I was able to find out the following. Each year's longest book read has fallen between 600 and 900 pages.

Books Read per Year

Apropos of last week's chart, I decided to look at how many books I read each year and what slice of them were by authors I'd never read before. Is it true I've read more in recent years? Is it true that I read more of the same authors earlier on than I do today? Let's see:

Indeed, my gut feeling appears largely to be true! The number of books has gone up--though it's descended again the last few years. And the books by authors I've never read has been the larger share in most recent years. But let's see how it works on a percentage basis each year.

Yep, this confirms, by percentage, what I had thought. The blue takes up less space overall in more recent years than it did in earlier ones.

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Vladimer Nabokov

Having charted my Vonnegut reading last week, I figured I should do that same for another writer who I've more consciously tried to read more of over the years and with whom I've done so throughout my life (as opposed to writers like Kerouac or Fante, who I read largely in my twenties and who I'm largely confined to rereading now, if I read anything at all).

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Kurt Vonnegut

So I recently finished up God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that ranked as the favorite of an acquaintance of mine back in my early twenties. It's taken me twenty years to get to it. I don't know why. It's not that I'm not a Vonnegut fan. He wrote some good stuff. But I just haven't run out and read a lot of his fiction. As the chart below shows, I read him most in my early twenties.

There's a certain obviousness to his points and themes, but I don't know that that should make him someone a person outgrows. There's much to admire, including that voice that is very much his own--and certainly enough, I think, that it won't be ten more years before I return to him.

Book Purchases by Store

So come September, Borders is no longer. It's the victim of changes to the book-buying industry, which has gone progressively digital (as well as the victim, apparently, of too aggressive of an expansion earlier in the 2000s). It's one of the two brick-and-mortar new bookstores where I live; soon, only Barnes & Noble will be left, unless one counts the college bookstore. (This just in, however: a new indie is due to open soon.)

This got me to thinking regarding my own collection of books and where I've done my purchasing. I was going to guess that most of my books came from used bookstore outlets (the result, in part, of a four-year stint without access to a library), with Amazon another large contender. The statistics, however, surprised me.

I didn't survey my whole collection, as it would have taken too much time. But I selected two shelves of general nonfiction and two shelves of fiction and wrote out where each book came from. Here are the results:

Nonfiction B-G

Nonfiction H-W

Fiction D-G

Fiction G-K

So what did I learn? That most of my books I actually purchased new--they weren't remainders, weren't used, weren't freebies from work, and weren't gifts. I also learned that most of the new books I own came from bookstores, not from Amazon.

But then I began to suspect that the statistics might be somewhat skewed. After all, Amazon has only been a real viable entity for a decade. Maybe most of my books predate Amazon. And maybe, I thought, most of my new books, were purchased during the five-plus years I worked for an independent bookstore. So I decided to break the new books down by place of purchase to see, and here are the results for nonfiction and fiction:

NonfictionFiction

Indeed, after reviewing the list of stores I purchased books at, I have confirmed that most of the fiction was picked up while I was an employee at Hunter's books, which also coincided with my days in college. The college bookstore served as the source for most nonfiction, Hunter's as the source for most fiction. Other stores, including Borders, make up only a small slice of my purchasing. As we go forward, Amazon will likely pick up more of my personal library's share.

But that also caused me to reflect on the nature of bookstores themselves and what I like. I used to prefer the superstores, or a large indie. This was because they had the largest selection, and twenty years ago, that is what a good bookstore in my view could do--give me any Kerouac, Nabokov, Scott Bradfield, etc., book I wanted. But I worked in a bookstore, and I wanted to be able to purchase these things.

Now, with Amazon, a large selection no longer seems so important. I go in stores now and feel lost if they're really large. First, despite their size, they rarely stock the (full) work of some of the authors I care for. Second, as someone who no longer knows the week's best-sellers and the books that got the best reviews in the New York Times, I'm lost because there are just so many new books to choose from, and a lot of them things I'd care not one whit about. But with regard to the first, I can always order the book from Amazon if I want it that badly. And with regard to the second, I don't need a large bookstore anymore in which to browse. I find, rather, that I prefer a smaller store with a limited selection that matches my own taste. If I go in, and the store stocks mostly John Grisham novels and the like, I know it's not my sort of place; however, if I go in, and there are a couple of really good books I've heard about in recent years prominently displayed, I have a feeling I can trust the book buyer's taste, and suddenly, I'm back to the old days where bookstores excited, because I know that each book in there is a possible great discovery.