On to the stats!
How many total books? nn 53 nnLast year I read 70; best year ever was 2009 with 86. Another goal for 2012 is to have goodreads.com and my own tracking MATCH – but I tend to count books there that I don’t here; i.e. cookbooks, reference.
How many fiction and non fiction?
I read 11 nonfiction books or 21%. Thirty percent of my reading last year was NF.
Male/Female author ratio? LOTS more — 68% — more women than men this year.
Favorite book of 2011?
Always a tough question because I qualify. For books that MOVED me? The History of Love and The Stone Diaries. For ones that felt cozy warm and safe and happily-sighable? The Tapestry of Love – also my biggest surprise of the year.
I rated 9 books 5 stars and this continues my trend ranking 17% in the top group; same percentage as last year AND the year before.
The Sea / John Banville
The Things They Carried / Tim O’Brien
Sugar Queen / Sarah Addison Allen
The Secret Garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett
The History of Love / Nicole Krauss
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks / Rebecca Skloot
The Tapestry of Love / Rosy Thornton
The Killer Angels / Michael Shaara
The Stone Diaries / Carol Shields
As to the MANY books I rated FOUR Slices of Pie (24 or 45%), do any shine? Hunger Games, of course. The only change I dared make was to bump Just Kids by Patti Smith up to 4 stars only because it still makes me smile.
Least favourite? I had more DNF’s this year and one I didn’t rate at all (Ulysses). I only finished one of the 6 TWO star books I rated: Broken Colors was not impressive. I had NO 1 star books. (Per goodreads.com, TWO STARS is ‘I liked it only OK.”)
Any that you simply couldn’t finish and why? I gave up on The Paris Wife, Beneath the Thirteen Moons, Eyes Like Stars, The Book of Awful and Ulysses.
Oldest book read? Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891.
Newest? I read a bunch more current-year publisheds! 9. But I don’t have it recorded which was LATEST. I read a lot more published in 2010, too. So I stayed much more in the ‘recently published’ than I ever have.
Longest and shortest book titles? Fiction: The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Nonfiction: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I think. Shortest was D.V.
Longest and shortest books?
Last year I bragged about reading more chunksters; this year I read ONE. Only two books were over 400 pages! egads that sounds horrendous. oh well. I read 7 books that had fewer than 200 pages. With 16,176 pages over 53 books, the average length is 305.
Most pages: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. 604
Fewest pages: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. 160
How many books from the library? Six, one audio.
Any translated books? Yes, after not having any last year, I had 3 in 2011: from Japanese, German and Italian.
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author? I didn’t read any author twice within the 12 months but I repeated the following for a second time: Geraldine Brooks, Helene Hanff, John Banville, David McCullough, Simon Van Booy, Sarah Addison Allen, and Lisa Genova; for my ‘mulitiples’: John Green (4th) and C.S.Lewis (8th) Boy if that doesn’t prove I don’t read series books… But it does strike me odd how many males ‘repeat’. Hmmmm.
Any re-reads? NOPE.
Favourite character of the year? Molly, the real kickass chick in Neuromancer?
Which countries did you go to through the page in your year of reading? Austria, Italy, Japan, Greece, Bosnia, France, Ireland, Russia, Germany, the UK, Canada and Viet Nam (12). The US states I visited specifically are Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, New York, Arkansas, Minnesota, California, Illinois and Tennessee (10) but some books wandered through the Northwest and also the Southwest, and the Plains.
Which book wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation? Let’s just say I can blame Nancy the BookFool for many many. Quite a few, she sent or put into my hands.
Which author was new to you in 2011 that you now want to read the entire works of? Rosy Thornton and Carol Sheilds. Simon Van Booy was the only author I mentioned in this answer last year that I managed to try again.
Which books are you annoyed you didn’t read?
And I quote from last year’s report: “I didn’t get to ANY Ian McEwan! What’s UP with THAT!? I’ll fix that in 2011.” I didn’t. I didn’t read any Tracy Kidder, Diana Wynne Jones, Margaret Atwood! And I keep piling on the author must-read list…
Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read? Yes. The Things They Carried, something by Haruki Murakami and Rosy Thornton! :)
STATS: 53 Books
RATINGS: 9 FIVE 17%, 24 FOUR 45%, 13 THREE 25%, 6 TWO 11%, 0 ONE -%
PAGE COUNTS: 19,732 which averages to 278 per book. [HA! Last year's page total for 87 books was 24,186 which also averaged to 278 per book.]
1001 Books To Read Before You Die: 6
Chunksters (over 450 pages): 2
Male Female Ratio 17 : 36 (in 2010, my Women Writers count was ALSO 36!)
Short Story Collections: 4 (with Honorable Mention to Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find – I only read 2 in collection and won’t yet mark as done-read.)
Unintentional Themes: Titles with “Of Love: – 3,
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzPulitzer Prize Winners – 4
By Decade:
in 2011 – 9
in 2010 – 11,
2000-2009 – 17,
1990 – 5,
1980 – 3,
1970 – 2,
1960 – 1,
1950 – 1,
1940 – 1,
1930 – 0,
1920 – 1,
1910 – 1,
1900 – 0,
1891 – 1 Oldest book: Tess by Hardy
New to Me Authors: 44
Nonfiction: 11, 21%
Fantasy: 7
Debuts: at least 2 that I know off the top of my head, but I’m thinking maybe 4-5. I vow to keep better track of this next this year.
postscript: This is my 2010 WrapUp and this is my 2009 WrapUp.
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