Reading Habits

3/14/2020: Started self-quarantining due to COVID-19
3/15/2020: Read a whole book start to finish
3/16/2020: Reorganized my book tracking spreadsheet
3/17/2020: Made charts about my reading habits

I’ve accumulated a few dozen rows of data about books I’ve read over the past two-ish years. To ring in a productive self-quarantine, I decided to get a better understanding of my reading habits and use those insights to set goals for this year’s book consumption.

Books per Year

Having an excess of time on my hands, I used my Kindle download history to make assumptions about the completion date for each book. I also used online word count estimators to guess the total words for each book.

Using this data, I was able to plot the cumulative words read and books read for each year. 2018 was a particularly good year, reading-wise–I read a little under two books a week for the entire second half of the year. I was interning in NYC during that time, and had over an hour of commute every day to read.

2019 was less productive–I read eleven books total. However, it was still a decent chunk of words thanks to the massive ASOIAF series. Those books make up the large steps on the wordcount graph near day 150.

Favorite Genres

Counting total books read by their primary genre yielded no surprises: I really enjoy sci-fi/fantasy. The group of fantasy/sci-fi/sci-fantasy makes up 58% of total books read since I started tracking this 2 years ago.

Favorite Authors

Similarly unsurprising was my graph of top authors. I’ve been a China Miéville fan for over a decade, and binged a good amount of his works in 2018. The other top authors all fall into the same sci-fi/fantasy group.

Reading Goals

I used these insights to come up with some personal reading goals for the remaining 9 months of 2020:

• Read at least 12 books this year
  • Definitely achievable given my past reading pace. With 2 books down at time of writing, I only have 10 more books to go!
• Become a more balanced reader by:
  • Reading books in at least four new genres
  • Having less than half of books read this year be sci-fi/fantasy
• Read books by authors outside of my favored set
  • This should be pretty straightforward if I manage the goal of reading in new genres. So, I’ll make a more detailed goal: find an author I enjoy in a new genre and reading at least two books by that author.

Time to head to the (ebook) library!