I gave up early on my reading plans for this year, though that never stops me from making them. And that list I made? In the end I read four of the books (in one case I didn't read the title I chose but did read another one by the same author) and a fifth I've just started and will carry over into next year. So maybe that didn't turn out quite as bad as I was expecting. Plans and lists are really only jumping off places anyway, right? I like having an idea of what I might like to read but then give myself wiggle room to read at whim and let the books lead me in their own serendipitous direction. I do like looking back over the course of the year, however, and see how the books fell (so to speak).
- Books read: 88 -- I'm not sure I'll ever reach 100 but I'm pleased to get in this many.
- Audio books: 1 -- And I'm listening to another right now. I never actually count an audio book as one of my 'books read'. Even though the book is new to me, it doesn't feel like quite the same experience. In this case the book in question was Georgette Heyer's Venetia, which I greatly enjoyed.
- eBooks: 4 -- A new category! Can you tell I still prefer paper books far more than ebooks?
- Fiction (not mysteries or short stories and I'm counting classics separately, too): 43
- Nonfiction: 7 -- This is such a paltry number (which might be bumped up by one if I finish one last memoir I started ages ago) made all the more disappointing since several of the books were very slim volumes. As a matter of fact all the books with the exception of Capote's true crime story were all memoirs, so nothing really very meaty either.
- Classics: 8 -- Another sad number considering two of the books were closer to novellas than full length novels. I want to read more classics next year.
- Mysteries/Crime/Suspense: 27 -- Now you see where I spent so much of my reading time!
- Science fiction: 0 -- Unless I count the novel I read by Molly Gloss for the Slaves, which is sort of literary science fiction...then I can say 1.
- Espionage: 1? So much for my Season of Spies, though I am reading Helen MacInnes right now. I've decided to pick up where I left off from that list and read a few more books this winter. Along with the MacInnes I have one book waiting in the wings, which is quite short and will perhaps be my first book read of 2012.
- YA novels: 1 -- My niece urged me to read a book she was reading for school and was so excited about that I couldn't say no.
- Books written by women: 63 -- I always read more women authors than men. I don' set out to do so, but it just happens that way.
- Books written by men: 25
- Books written by more than one author: 0
- American authors: 19
- British authors: 41
- Canadian/Australian/Irish authors: 5
- Books in translation: 24 -- I tend to be very predictable when it comes to reading more British authors than American, but those numbers decreased considerably this year since I read far more books in translation than I ever have before (due to reading so much crime fiction as well as the German Literature readalong). Original languages include: Catalan, Swedish, French, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese and Icelandic. I'm quite pleased by this and hope the trend continues next year.
- Short story collections: 1
- Graphic novels: 0
- Plays: 0
- Virago Modern Classics: 4
- Persephone Books: 0 -- Oops. Must rectify this next year, since I am still collecting these books.
- Books read that were checked out from the library: 27 -- Down ten books from last year. Does this mean I read more from my own shelves?
- Rereads: 5
- Book club books (Slaves of Golconda, Cornflower's Book Group, my Postal Reading Group and the Literature and War Readalong): 18 -- This number more than doubled, which hopefully means I am reading more outside my comfort zone (at least on occasion).
- Multiple books by the same author: 5 -- E.M. Delafield, W. Somerset Maugham, Helene Hanff, Liza Marklund, Georgette Heyer, and Andrea Maria Schenkel. Not so much of this this year, which surprises me. There are a number of authors I've read whose works I want to explore more of, however.
- Books by Nebraska authors: 0
I realize it's probably silly to keep track of these things, but it's more out of curiosity (and so I can put that Excel spreadsheet I keep to use). I should mention that only three books I read this year were written prior to 1900, and those three books were 19th century novels. All in all I am pretty predictable considering last year's statistics. Since I tend to read about the same number of books each year, it's very tricky trying to plan any sort of reading as there are only a certain number of books I can squeeze in and as I like to read mostly at whim--how they all fit together at the end of the year never looks like how I expected it to at the beginning! Not that that stops me from making a very few plans for the new year . . .