January 8, 2012

A Geeky Look Back at 2011

Ok people, I'm about to get all nerdy on you. Are you prepared? Because I broke down my reading from 2011 with graphs. And PIE CHARTS. Oh yes, it's Quirky Bookworm Infographic-palooza!
As you can see, I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction. Nonfiction only made up 21% of the books I read. I broke it up into genre below. As expected, the mystery genre was biggest -- partly because it's my personal favorite, partly because most of the stuff I read for Shelf Awareness is mystery. I'm most surprised by how big a slice fantasy/sci-fi (green) and YA (teal) each got. That would be thanks to my discovery of Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb, and Lev Grossman this year, and my re-reading of all the Harry Potter and Anne of Green Gables books.
Now, for the chart that really surprised me. After seeing some tweets by other bloggers who were sorting books based on author's gender, I decided to do the same. At first, I was slightly horrified by the disparity: (the two lefthand columns). But, then I realized that I'd read a lot of series by women -- eight L.M. Montgomery books, six Georgette Heyers, etc. If I only count each author once, no matter how many of their books I read, it's much more balanced: (the two righthand columns). It's still definitely female-heavy though.

 
So, in light of this analysis, here are my specific goals for my 2012 reading:
  • I want at least 25% (or 38 of my 150 books) to be nonfiction.
  • I want to increase the general fiction portion of the pie. As part of that, I'm planning to read at least 6 classic novels that I haven't read before. Maybe 2012 will be the year I finally try War and Peace!
  • I want to try for a little more evenness in my male/female reading. I'm not going to put a specific number on this, but just look for more new male authors to try.
  • I'm also going to join Teresa's Audio Book Challenge, at the Married level. That's 25+ audio books in the year. I debated joining some other challenges, but since I'm pretty new to the goal-making, book-reviewing type reading, decided to take it easy this year!
Have you joined any reading challenges? Have you set any goals for yourself? Tell me your 2012 reading goals in the comments, and I'll include them in a later post!