Monday, December 31, 2018

2018 Roundup: Best-Of and Pie

Well, dear readers, another year has come and gone. It's been a good year here, though not as active as usual. My goal is 150 books a year, and I barely made that this year, with 154 books read. I blame The Sims 4, which I acquired in June during a sale and subsequently became my favorite activity to combine with podcasts.  Looking on what I read, technology edged out everything else -- and honestly, that goes beyond my reading,  because I've been subscribing to more tech channels and listening to a lot of synthwave this year.




As usual, nonfiction predominates, totaling 64% this year which is right in line with my usual average. History, Science, and Technology were the leaders there.  Ebooks came in strong this year, accounting for 44% of my reading.  When I converted all of my booklists into Excel and imposed a uniform categorization, I noticed that female authors were....scarce, usually under 10% of my reading. This year I had an unannounced goal of reading more female authors, and consider the 22% they managed to be an improvement.

This year's highlights, with the top ten in bold.

Science fiction had a banner year -- 17 books, not counting Star Trek and Star Wars, and most of them  were hits this year. as I discovered and explored the works of John Scalzi (Agent to the Stars), Cory Doctorow (Little Brother and Pirate Cinema), and Ernest Cline (Ready Player One  &; Armada) I also read Andy Weir's second novel, Artemis.  I experienced RPO, uniquely, across three mediums: I listened to the Audible presentation first, watched the movie, and read the physical book.  A special note about Ready Player One: I read the book, listened to the Audible experience, and watched the movie.  I really liked that book.  It's one I've already started to re-read.

Star Trek also had a strong year,  with nine titles between The Fall,  Vanguard, Section 31, and the Mirror Universe series.  My favorite was David Mack's Ceremony of Losses, followed by Rise Like Lions, which put the Mirror Universe in a good position for future stories beyond tired rebels v alliance tropes.

In History, always queen of the stacks, my favorite was easily Exploding the Phone, a history of the phone-pheaking movement which later gave rise to the first computer hackers. Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England was another favorite. I also want to mention Skygods, a history of Pan Am, and Fares Please!, a social history of trolleys, buses, and subways in America.  Fool's Errand and The Looming Tower were also notable.

Biographies had an uptick this year,  and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was so good that I wound up reading a series of Apple-related books because of it.

Science had an OK year, fine on numbers but lukewarm on quality. Two science books didn't get full reviews. Ends of the EarthGut, and This is Your Brain on Parasites  stood out from the rest.

Technology had a healthy year, and I especially enjoyed  The One Device and The Art of Invisibility

Historical Fiction practically didn't exist this year, with under five titles. The Memory of Old Jack and Anne of Avonlea  were the most exceptional titles, and they're only arguably historical fiction.  I picked up the latest Cornwell novel on release, and...well, turned it back in. I like the Saxon stories, but at this point Uhtred is old and tired, and I can't tell the last few books from each other.

Religion and Philosophy were...well, even more nonexistant, with one standout title in philosophy (How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life), and...no books on religion? I did read Anthony Esolen's Nostalgia, which partially involves religion, but wasn't overtly about it. Religion  was a strong presence in books like From Achilles to Christ and Further Up and Further In: A Guide to Narnia, however.  Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, reflections on working in a funeral home, arguably has a place here. What are religion and philosophy, after all, except attempts to make sense of the world -- and our inevitable departure from it?

Looking back, I'm not entirely comfortable with the paucity of more meaningful books as opposed to technology,  but one year doesn't make a pattern. I've had years where I was obsessed with France, or health. We'll see how things look next year!

14 comments:

  1. I'm *definitely* feeling a lack of Philosophy lately. That'll be showing up more often in 2019 - at least 2-3 anyway. My next 10 fiction pile covers two of my faves - history & crime so I'm sorted there.

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    1. Alain de Botton should get me started philosophy-wise next year. Crime sounds fun! I'm currently replaying missions from Hitman: Blood Money over and over again. Addictive, exploring the map and finding new ways to solve it..

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    2. Oh, I have LOTS of crime novels stacking up. Mostly modern/contemporary but others too. Think I might actually read some Aristotle this year. It's about time I did. Still playing No Man's Sky. Over 350 hours now..... [grin]

      Happy New Year!

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  2. Always impressed by your reading stats! Sometimes you just got to go where the books take you...plus, technology touches on so many areas of life, it's not a bad trend to have. ;)

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    1. That's true, and something I was thinking about with history: it always overwhelms the rest because there's tech history, political history, social history, history of science, etc.

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  3. eclectic list: lots of interesting stuff... Happy New Year and here's to a better one than the last one...

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    1. It's something of an addiction on computers. I think in a past life I must have worked for IBM or AT&T, because I'm forever organizing and recording things for posterity. If only I could so easily impose order on my DVD collection!

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  5. I am jelous of the number of books that you finished:)

    I love the way that you have it broken down here. I think that you are one of the few bloggers who reads such a high percentage of non - fiction. I aim for about 50 percent but I actually read about 40 percent non fiction. Have a Happy New Year’s!

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    1. Nonfiction readers are a rarer breed in the blogging world, that's true.

      And thanks for the comment on breaking things down.I've been doing it for years, of course, but in the past summer I came up with a list of consistent labels. The data above was put together in less than ten minutes this year, because I've been using an Excel worksheet. After each title, I have fields for Fiction/Non, Category, Genre, Type (Physical/Ebook/Audio), and Author MF. Yesterday was just a matter of sorting them to get the counts for each category, then putting those numbers into Meta-Chart. MUCH easier than previus years where I would manually go down the list counting!

      Happy New Year's to you as well!

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    2. We are very rare, indeed! My blog is almost exclusively non-fiction, and it is hard to find others who read similar books as me!

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  6. That is an interesting way to graph your reading habits. If I knew how to make a pie graph out of the books I read, I would. Did you like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes? I tried it but didn't finish.

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    1. What I did at first was think of the major genres I read (historical fiction, history, science, etc), then count up how many books I have in each category. These days I just use Excel. Once I have the numbers I go to Meta-Chart and just put in the numbers: there's a box for the label ("History") and a box for the value, or the data ("66", if I read 66 history books). Then the website just generates the graph for me. :)


      And I really liked Smoke Gets In Your Eyes! I'm planning on reading her other book about death traditions across the globe.

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