Books I read in 2016

Reading is one of the favoured hobbies in the DabblingWithData household. In 2016 my beloved fiance invited me to participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. It’s simple enough – you set a target and then see if you can read that many books.

The challenge does have its detractors; you can see that an obsession with it will perversely incentivise reading “Spot the Dog” over “Lord of the Rings“. But if you participate in good spirits, then you end up building a fun log of your reading which, if nothing else, gives you enough data that you’ll remember at least the titles of what you read in years hence.

I don’t quite recall where the figure came from, but I had my 2016 challenge set at 50 books. Fifty, you might say, that’s nearly one a week! Surely not possible – or so I thought. I note however that my chief competitor, following a successful year, has set this year’s target to 100, so apparently it’s very possible for some people).

Anyway, Goodreads has both a CSV export feature of the books you log as having read in the competition, and also an API.  I therefore thought I’d have a little explore of what I managed to read. Who knows, perhaps it’ll help improve my 2017 score!

Please click through for slightly more interactive versions of any chart, or follow this link directly. Most data is taken directly from Goodreads, with a little editing by hand.

Oh no, I missed my target 😦 Yes, fifty books proved too challenging for me in 2016 – although I got 80% of the way there, which I don’t think is too terrible. My 2017 target remains at fifty.

The cumulative chart shows a nice boost towards the end of August, which was summer holiday time for me. This has led me to conclude the following actionable step: have more holidays.

I was happy to see that I hadn’t subconsciously tried to cheat too much by reading only short books. From the nearly 14k page-equivalents I ploughed through, the single most voluminous book was Anathem. Anathem is a mix of sci-fi and philosophy, full of slightly made-up words just to slow you down further – an actual human:alien glossary is generously included in the back of the book.

The shortest was the Ladybird Book of the Meeting. This was essential reading for work purposes of course, and re-taught me eternal truths such as “Meetings are important because they give everyone a chance to talk about work. Which is easier than doing it”.

Most of my books were in the 2-400 page range – although of course different books make very different usages of a “page”.

So what did I read about?

Science fiction is #1 by book volume. I have an affinity for most things that have been deemed geeky through history (and perhaps you do too, if you got this far in!), so this isn’t all that surprising.

Philosophy at #2 is a relatively new habit, at least as a concerted effort. I felt that I’d got into the habit of concentrating too much on data (heresy I know), technology and related subjects in previous years’ reading habits – so thought I’d broaden my horizons a bit by looking into, well, what Google tells me is merely the study of “the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence”. It’s very interesting, I promise. Although it can be pretty slow to read as every other sentence one does risk ending up staring at the ceiling wondering whether the universe exists, and other such critical issues. Joking aside, the study of epistemology, reality and so on might not be a bad idea for analysty types.

Lower down we’ve got the cheap thriller and detective novels that are somewhat more relaxing, not requiring either a glossary or a headache tablet.

I was a little surprised at what a low proportion of my books were read in eBook format. For most – not all – books, I think eReaders give a much superior reading experience to ye olde paper. This I’m aware is a controversial minority  opinion but I’ll stick to it and point you towards a recent rant on the Hello Internet podcast to explain why.

So I’d have guessed a 80-90% eBook rate – but a fair number of paper books actually slipped in. Typically I suspect these are ones I borrowed, or ones that aren’t available in eBook formats. Some of Asimov’s books, of which I read a few this year, for instance are usually not available on Kindle.

On which subject, authors. Most included authors only fed my book habit once last year, although the afore-mentioned Asimov got his hooks into me. This was somewhat aided by the discovery of a cluster of his less well-known books fortuitously being available for 50p each at a charity sale. But if any readers are interested in predictive analytics and haven’t read the Foundation Trilogy, I’d fully recommend even a full price copy for an insight into what the world might have to cope with if your confusion matrix ever showed perfection in all domains.

Sam Harris was the second most read. That fits in with the philosophy theme. He’s also one of the rare people who can at times express opinions that intuitively I do not agree with at all, but does it in a way such that the train of thought that led him to his conclusions is apparent and often quite reasonable. He is, I’m aware, a controversial character on most sides of any political spectrum for one reason or another.

Back to format – I started dabbling with audio books, although at first did not get on so well with them; there’s a certain amount of concentration needed which comes easier to me when visual-reading than audio-reading. But I’m trying again this year, and it’s going better – practice makes perfect?

The “eBook /Audio” category refers to a couple of lecture series from the Great Courses  which give you  a set of half hour lectures to listen to, and an accompanying book to follow along with. These are not free but they cover a much wider range of topics than the average online MOOC seems to (plus you don’t feel bad about not doing assignments – there are none).

Lastly, the GoodReads rating. Do I read books that other people think are great choices? Well, without knowing the background distribution of ratings, and taking into account the number of reviews and from whom, it’s hard to do much except assume a relative ranking when the sample gets large enough.

It does look like my books are on the positive side of the 5-points scale, although definitely not the amongst GoodReads’ most popular. Right now, that list starts with The Hunger Games, which I have read and enjoyed, but it wasn’t in 2016. Looking down the global popularity list, I do see quite a few I’ve had a go at in the past, but almost none that I regret choosing one of my actual choices over this year at first sight!

For the really interested readers out there, you can see the full list of my books and links to the relevant Goodreads pages on the last tab of the viz.