Books I read in 2017

Long term readers (hi!) may recall my failure to achieve the target I had of reading 50 books in 2016. I had joined the 2016 Goodreads reading challenge, logged my reading activity, and hence had access to the data needed track my progress at the end of the year. It turns out that 41 books is less than 50.

Being a glutton for punishment, I signed up again in 2017, with the same cognitively terrifying 50 book target – basically one a week, although I cannot allow myself to think that way. It is now 2018, so time to review how I did.

Goodreads allows you to log which books you are reading and when you finished them. The finish date is what counts for the challenge. Nefarious readers may spot a few potential exploits here, especially if competing for only 1 year. However, I tried to play the game in good faith (but did I actually do so?  Perhaps the data will reveal!).

As you go through the year, Goodreads will update you on how you are doing with your challenge. Or for us nerd types, you can download a much more detailed and useful CSV. There’s also a the Goodreads API to explore, if that floats your boat.

Similarly to last year, I went with the CSV.  I did have to hand-edit the CSV a little, both to fill in a little missing data that appears to be absent from the Goodreads dataset, and also to add couple of extra data fields that I wanted to track that Goodreads doesn’t natively support. I then popped the CSV into a Tableau dashboard, which you can explore interactively by clicking here.

Results time!

Joyful times! In 2017 I got to, and even exceeded, my target! 55 books read.

In comparison to my 2016 results, I got ahead right from the start of the year, and widened the gap notably in Q2. You can see a similar boost to that witnessed in 2016 around the time of the summer holidays, weeks 33-35ish. Not working is clearly good for one’s reading obligations.

What were the characteristics of the books I read?

Although page count is a pretty vague and manipulable measure – different books have different physical sizes, font sizes, spacing, editions – it is one of the few measures where data is easily available so we’ll go with that. In the case of eBooks or audio books (more on this later) without set “pages” I used the page count of the respective paper version. I fully acknowledge this rigour of this analysis as falling under “fun” rather than “science”.

So the first revelation is that this year’s average pages per read book was 300, a roughly 10% decrease from last year’s average book. Hmm. Obviously, if everything else remains the same,  the target of 50 books is easier to meet if you read shorter books! Size doesn’t always reflect complexity or any other influence around time to complete of course.

I hadn’t deliberately picked short books – in fact, being aware of this incentive I had tried to be conscious of avoiding doing this, and concentrate on reading what I wanted to read, not just what boosts the stats. However, even outside of this challenge, I (most likely?) only have a certain number of years to live, and hence do feel a natural bias towards selecting shorter books if everything else about them was to be perfectly equal. Why plough through 500 pages if you can get the same level of insight about a topic in 150?

The reassuring news is that, despite the shorter average length of book, I did read 20% more pages in total. This suggests I probably have upped the abstract “quantity” of reading, rather than just inflated the book count by picking short books. There was also a little less variation in page count between books this year than last by some measures.

In the distribution charts, you can see a spike of books at around 150 pages long this year which didn’t show up last year. I didn’t note a common theme in these books, but a relatively high proportion of them were audio books.

Although I am an avid podcast listener, I am not a huge fan of audio books as a rule. I love the idea as a method to acquire knowledge whilst doing endless chores or other semi-mindless activities. I would encourage anyone else with an interest of entering book contents into their brain to give them a whirl. But, for me, in practice I struggle to focus on them in any multi-tasking scenario, so end up hitting rewind a whole lot. And if I am in a situation where I can dedicate full concentration to informational intake, I’d rather use my eyes than my ears. For one, it’s so much faster, which is an important consideration when one has a book target!  With all that, the fact that audio books are over-represented in the lower page-counts for me is perhaps therefore not surprising. I know my limits.

I have heard tell that some people may consider audio books as invalid for the book challenge. In defence, I offer up that Goodreads doesn’t seem to feel this way in their blog post on the 2018 challenge. Besides, this isn’t the Olympics – at least no-one has sent me a gold medal yet – so everyone can make their own personal choice. For me, if it’s a method to get a book’s contents into my brain, I’ll happily take it. I just know I have to be very discriminating with regards to selecting audio books I can be sure I will be able to focus on. Even I would personally regard it cheating to log a book that happened to be audio-streaming in the background when I was asleep. If you don’t know what the book was about, you can’t count it.

So, what did I read about?

Book topics are not always easy to categorise. The categories I used here are mainly the same as last year, based entirely on my 2-second opinion rather than any comprehensive Dewey Decimal-like system. This means some sort of subjectivity was necessary. Is a book on political philosophy regarded as politics or philosophy? Rather than spend too much time fretting about classification, I just made a call one way or the other. Refer to above comment re fun vs science.

The main changes I noted were indeed a move away from pure philosophical entries towards those of a political tone. Likewise, a new category entrant was seen this year in “health”. I developed an interest in improving one’s mental well-being via mindfulness and meditation type subjects, which led me to read a couple of books on this, as well as sleep, which I have classified as health.

Despite me continuing to subjectively feel that I read the large majority of books in eBook form, I actually moved even further away from that being true this year. Slightly under half were in that form. That decrease has largely been taken up by the afore-mentioned audio books, of which I apparently read (listened?) 10 this year. Similarly to last year, 2 of the audio entries were actually “Great Courses“, which are more like a sequence of university-style lectures, with an accompanying book containing notes and summaries.

My books have also been slightly less popular with the general Goodreads-rating audience this year, although not dramatically so.

Now, back to the subject of reading shorter books in order to make it easier to hit my target: the sheer sense of relief I felt when I finished book #50 and hence could go wild with relaxed, long and slow reading, made me concerned as to whether I had managed to beat that bias or not. I wondered whether as I got nearer to my target, the length of the books I selected might have risen, even though this was not my intention.

Below, the top chart shows that average page count by book completed on a monthly basis, year on year.

 

The 2016 data risks producing somewhat invalid conclusions, especially if interpreted without reference to the bottom “count of books” chart, mainly because of the existence of a  September 2016, a month where I read a single book that happened to be over 1,000 pages long.

I also hadn’t actually decided to participate in the book challenge at the start of 2016. I was logging my books, but just for fun (imagine that!). I don’t remember quite when it was suggested I should explicitly join then challenge, but before then it’s less likely I felt pressure to read faster or shorter.

Let’s look then only at 2017:

Sidenote: What happened in July?! I only read one book, and it wasn’t especially long. I can only assume Sally Scholz’s intro to feminism must have been particularly thought-provoking.

For reference, I hit book #50 in November this year. There does seem some suggestion in the data that indeed that I did read longer books as time went on, despite my mental disavowal of doing such.

Stats geeks might like to know that the line of best fit shown in the top chart above could be argued to represent that 30% of the variation in book length over time, with each month cumulatively adding on an estimate of an extra 14 pages above a base of 211 pages.  It should be stated that I didn’t spend too long considering the best model or fact-checking the relevant assumptions for this dataset. Instead just pressed “insert trend line” in Tableau and let it decide :).

I’m afraid the regression should not be considered as being traditionally statistically significant at the 0.05 level though, having a p-value of – wait for it – 0.06. Fortunately, for my intention to publish the above in Nature :), I think people are increasingly aware of the silliness of uncontextual hardline p-value criteria and/or publication bias.

Nonetheless, as I participate in the 2018 challenge – now at 52 books, properly one a week – I shall be conscious of this trend and double-up my efforts to keep reading based on quality rather than length. Of course, I remain very open – some might say hopeful! – that one sign of a quality author is that they can convey their material in a way that would be described as concise. You generous readers of my ramblings may detect some hypocrisy here.

For any really interested readers out there, you can once more see the full list of the books I read, plus links to the relevant Goodreads description pages, on the last tab of the interactive viz.