2011 Stats

I was trying to finish my last library book before the year closed, even stayed up a bit late last night and welcomed the new year with a book in my lap and eggnog in hand, ha. But I didn't make it through that one, so Head Cases will bridge the gap and be the last borrowed book I read before diving into the TBR challenge.

Here's the numbers from 2011. No, they don't quite add up. I always make an error somewhere in counting, plus some books go into more than one category, and others might not have got counted- for example, I think I counted some picture books into the total tally but then didn't list them as either fiction or non-, so that's the first glaring error. Anyways, the count is roughly thus:

Total books read- 119

Fiction- 16
Non-fiction- 91

further breakdown:

Memoirs- 20
Gardening/ Food- 25
Nature- 8
Art- 2
Pregnancy books- 12
Animals nonfic- 30
Other nonfic- 9

Fantasy- 1
YA- 1
Historical fiction- 5
Animals in fiction- 4
J Fiction- 2
Picture books- 15

Short story collections- 2
Comics/ graphic novels- 5

Male authors- 50
Female authors- 52
co-authored- 12

owned books- 52
library books- 60
borrowed from a friend- 2
review copies- 5
books from bloggers- 3

Abandoned books- 5
Re-reads- 3

Places I visited during the year's reading: Ireland, England, Egypt, Africa, France, Russia, Holland and Ecuador. Not nearly so many as last year.

The numbers are quite a bit different from last year. (Except for the number of books read- that was exactly the same.) I continued on my trend of reading more and more non-fiction. In fact, I don't think there's ever been a year where I read so much non-fiction. I miss the novels. Mean to get more into them this coming year. I was surprised to find that I read no poetry, only one YA book and one fantasy. Fantasy used to be a huge genre for me. My ratio of men-to-women authors was about equal, as was the number of books I read off my own shelves compared to borrowed.

I did something a little different this year, which was to keep a running tally of books read, and which categories they fit into. This was to avoid having to count everything up at the end of the year (usually a big headache).

It worked pretty well. I counted up a few categories just to see how accurate my tally was to my blogging. There were probably a few books I just forgot to jot down, but for the categories I checked it more or less added up the same. I did read far more picture books than noted here; I just didn't start counting them until near the end of the year, nor did I review many of them. I plan to use this system again next year, it worked well for me. This time around I'm also going to keep track of which books I read off my TBR (whether physical or listed) and which I find browsing. I'm curious about that, too.

I usually do more here with listing notable books of the year such as my favorites, the ones I found most inspiring, amusing, and so forth but I'm just too tired right now. Might make another post out of it.

If you're at all interested, here's the last few years' numbers: 2010 and 2009 (before then I didn't do end-of-year stats)

So, Happy New Year everybody! May it be a great year of reading ahead, for all of us!