This is such a good thing to do before going into a new year of reading because it makes you aware of the areas where your reading has been lacking. If your goal is to read diversely, which mine is, it's important to know what you are neglecting. Maybe you lean too heavily on a certain author gender or show favoritism to a specific genre, or maybe you aren't reading enough world literature. One can only see these gaps after figuring out the stats.
Therefore, I went through all 129 books I read in 2014 and divided them by author gender, intended audience age, genre, author nationality, and language because these are the areas in which I want to read widely.
Author Gender
57 of the books I read last year were written by men while 72 had female authors. This is pretty even, so I'm happy with that.
Author Nationality
American: 36
British: 15
German: 2
French: 1
Russian: 1
Australian: 2
Indian: 1
Japanese: 54
Korean: 14
Brazilian: 1
South African: 1
This is one of the more important statistics when it comes to my personal reading goals. I really want to read works from all around the world, particularly from Asia.
I am pleased with how big of a percentage of my reading choices were by Asian authors, but almost all of those works were manga/manhwa. I was definitely neglecting Asian literary fiction this year.
Language
A large percentage of the translated works I read were comics, but not all of them.
Author nationality is more important to me than the original language of the work, but I was curious about the numbers.
Audience Age
Adult: 99
Young Adult: 14
Children's/Middlegrade: 16
The fact that adult literature dominates this chart is not surprising to me. I'm almost 30-years old, so this is the right age range for me.
I read a lot more YA, children's, and middlegrade than I usually do, so I am happy that it accounts for almost 25% of my reading.
Genres
Literary Fiction: 16
Classics: 8
Fantasy: 13
Science Fiction: 2
Horror: 3
Graphic Novels/Comics: 71
Historical Fiction: 1
Nonfiction: 11
Plays: 1
Poetry: 3
And now we get to the numbers that most people find the most important: genre.
This was the year I really got into graphic novels and comics, which is obvious from this chart. I read 71, including completing 4 manga/manhwa series. While it may seem like I favored this genre far too much, I still read 58 non-graphic driven works, which is average for me. Because they are so easy to get through quickly, I don't have have an issue with this genre taking up such a large percentage of my reading because they don't take up as much time.
Let's look at my genre percentages without graphic novels or comics factored in.
Literary fiction is my favorite genre, so it's not surprising that it gets 2nd place out of all the genres. I did expect it to account for more of my reading, however, so I'm pleased that I didn't swerve so heavily in that direction.
I ended up reading 8 classic works last year, which I am pleased with. Since being out of school, I've found that I have to be very intentional about reading classics since no one is forcing me to anymore. Most of the works I read were book club picks.
I am truly surprised at the amount of fantasy I got in this year. I do, however, wish that I had explored more science fiction and horror.
As I get older, I want to read more and more nonfiction, so I'm glad that I was able to read 11 nonfiction books this year. Out of those, 6 were Christian works. I hope to read more next year, and I intend to stick predominantly with Christian writing.
Wrap-Up
So, those are my reading statistics for 2014. I am pretty happy with those number, especially since I wasn't at all intentional in my choices. There are a few things I would like to see change by this time next year, but I will go over those in my 2015 reading goals.
Did you crunch your reading numbers? What were your statistics? Tell me in the comments below or on Twitter.
Happy reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment