My 2015 Reading Stats

302: that's the number of books I've read this year (not including picture books). I know that reading is not a competition. I just really, really love to read. Reading is obviously a big part of my self identity, so looking back and crunching numbers helps me to understand myself better. I made pie charts! (Click to make them bigger and more legible.)

Primary Audience: The proportion I read of kids' and YA to adult hasn't changed over the past few years.

Literature Category: A few books are impossible to categorize neatly. For example, Helen Humphreys' The River is both fiction and nonfiction. Erin Moure's Kapusta is both poetry and a play. Some categories are arbitrary.

Format: My audiobook numbers keep going up: 23% in 2013, 30% in 2014 and 36% in 2015. 

Nationality: These numbers are slightly fudged, since some authors have moved from one country to another. For example, is Claudia Rankine a Jamaican author or an American author? I skipped books with multiple creators (comics) and any that I didn't know the author's nationality. Italy got a bump this year because of all four in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. Other countries include: Australia (5); France (5); Japan (5); India (3); Germany (3); and one or two each from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Uruguay, Jamaica, Trinidad, Virgin Islands, Haiti, and Spain.

Diversity: These should each have their own pie or maybe a Venn diagram to show overlap, but it was simplest for me to do it this way. An example is Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, (a favourite book that I re-read) which is counted in LGBT and PoC and Women authors categories. Each category (except the space filler, duh) is a percentage of the total number of books that I read this year. I skipped any authors whose ethnic heritage is unknown to me. My numbers of books by queer authors are down a bit this year: I read 50 in 2014 and only 36 in 2015. 

Fiction Genres: Fantasy, science fiction and fairy tale retellings are all together in the Speculative category. Classics is for anything published over 50 years ago. Contemporary is mostly realistic fiction, but also a catch-all for stuff that doesn't fit neatly into any of the other genres.

A few more stats:
Read in translation: 29.
Edmonton authors: 6. My Two Bichons book group is doing a year of reading local in 2016, so I should have higher numbers in this category next time.
Read in French language: 5.
Books over 700 pages: 4.
Books that I didn't finish (after at least an hour's worth of time invested): 19.

I'm not the kind of person who needs a push to expand my reading horizons, but I looked at Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge for 2016 anyway. I've already done everything on it in 2015 except read a book and then watch the movie. I plan to see Room and The Martian this month, so that's that. I'll move right along to the big stack of books by my bed.

If you are interested in my reading stats from previous years, 2014 is here and 2013 is here.