This project aims to answer a few basic questions about my reading habits over the past few years. Specifically, it looks at the books I've read since the end of 2020, when I started keeping track of things. I've compiled a spreadsheet that contains basic information such as Title, Author, Genre, Format, etc. in the hopes of perhaps identifying trends of patterns in my reading habits. Additionally, this helps me see how my tastes change over time. Some basic questions I hope to answer are the following:
So let's get started! Here is a quick list of the 5 most recent books/stories I've read:
This one can be a little misleading, because I know for a fact that I have read a ton of Neil Gaiman's novels, however I didn't track any of them in my spreadsheet because I read them well over a decade ago (I only started tracking data for this project in 2020). So this gives you a more updated look at who I'm reading recently.
In general I prefer physical books - but the reason I've read so many eBooks is because I used to be an expat in South Korea, and it was simply a matter of convenience that I have a Kindle instead of a bunch of physical books. I was moving between apartments relatively often, and apartments in Seoul can be rather small, so I had limited space. Currently, I tend to buy physical books when they are more science-based, while I have more fiction books in eBook format.
I tend to base my ratings on how gripped I am whilst reading. There are many books whose content/plot might not have interested me as much, but the author's prose and writing style intrigued me (e.g. Haruki Murakami's novels). Conversely, there are also a lot of books where the content is right up my alley, but it's written in more of a straight-forward way (mostly science books).
This is an interesting one because a lot of factors go into it, which I can't quite capture in my spreadsheet. For example, philosophy books tend to take me very long to read because they can be rather dense and difficult to comprehend. Additionally, there were several instances where I needed to take a break, thus increasing the overall duration. That aside, I tend to get through books in about 2-3 weeks, depending on the genre.
This visualization was more fun to make than to look at, as a lot of the information is a bit irrelevant. I was just curious about what the visualization would look like when laid out as a heatmap.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, science books have more pages on average than other genres. Perhaps this is because the authors need more pages & time to explain their scientific concepts and ideas. The weighted average (so far) number of pages is around 260, which is a relatively decent sized page count. The average number of pages for fiction books I've read is just under that weighted average. Interestingly though, the fantasy sub-genre has almost an extra 100 pages on average compared to the next highest sub-genre, which is history. Perhaps fantasy authors enjoy fleshing out their fictitious worlds more so than history authors enjoy detailing our actual world.
Here is a basic list of books that I felt were very good (in my case, books that I rated an 8.0 or above). Whenever I meet another avid reader, I will almost certainly recommend a handful of these books! The books are not listed in personal preference or anything, only by their overall rating. I loved all of these books and highly recommend them!
This is another interesting visualization because you can clearly see some highs and lows in my reading habits. Life got in the way numerous times, which can help explain the drop from 2021 to 2023. However, at the time of this writing (June, 2024) I'm a bit more dedicated to reading on a daily basis. I'm hoping to continuously read ~24 books a year for the rest of my life - is that ambitious? Of course it is! But that is what tracking data is for - it helps keep me on track.