2017 reading roundup

[bedlamsbard]

My New Year's tradition of going through my reading spreadsheets for 2017 – I’ve done these every year since 2011, and they get more refined every year. This one was split up into “Books,” “Short Stories & Novellas,” “Comics,” “Audiobooks,” and “Did Not Finish.” (I tried to add “Articles” but I couldn’t keep up with that, so it ended up falling by the wayside.)

This year, I read:

• 176 books
  
• 132 rereads
• 36 Star Wars novels
• 5 nonfiction
• 171 fiction
• 84 short stories and novellas (most of these were rereads)
• often I don’t count short stories in this spreadsheet when the entire anthology is in the “books” spreadsheet, so this number is off by a lot.  (For example, none of the From a Certain Point of View short stories are in here, but FACPOV itself is in the “books” spreadsheet.)
• some of the titles from the books spreadsheet could have been in here too (like All Systems Red and Final Girls), since technically they were published as novellas, but if they were published in hard copy as a single volume they ended up the books spreadsheet.
• 139 comics
• I keep singles and collected editions in the same files, so this is a deceptive number; a collected edition could be twenty-five singles but is only on here once.
• I read a surprising number of non-Star Wars comics this year, actually, both DC/Marvel and indies.
• 4 audiobooks
• all Star Wars novels

It’s a little too much hassle for me to go through and figure out which books I read multiple times this year, rather than just being rereads in general, but I did more new reads this past year than I thought I had. Likewise, even though I keep track of genre, I’m not going to go through and figure out how many fantasy or sci-fi books I read this year.

Normally I count books I read in full for school on my spreadsheets, but I didn’t this time for some reason – I might do a separate spreadsheet for school reading for 2018. The nonfiction number would jump in that case. (I think the reason I didn’t count them this year is because I mostly went through books so fast for school that it didn’t actually feel like reading, just skimming, so I didn’t want them on the spreadsheet.)

One thing I did differently this year than I did for previous years is that I color-coded by the date I finished, so I could tell at a glance how many books I read in any given month instead of it all being a formless blur, and quickly tell if I’d finished a book months after I started. This was good, I’m glad I did that and I’ll do it again.

The other big change was having a Did Not Finish spreadsheet, which was really useful for me, since it meant that everything on the other spreadsheet was something I'd either finished or was in progress. (Though occasionally books just got deleted, instead of transferred over; I had to have a certain amount of involvement in it before it hit DNF rather than just vanishing from the spreadsheet.)

No big changes for the 2018 spreadsheets, which I've already put together -- the only thing is I've tentatively put in a "School" spreadsheet, so we'll see if I keep up with that or not. I feel like I've finally gotten the spreadsheets refined down to something that works for me.

Comments

[gothwalk]

I'm making some efforts to track my reading this year on Goodreads. In December, someone asked how many books I'd read in the year, and after some poking at Amazon, my Kindle app, and the accumulated piles of books in various parts of the house, I was able to give a ballpark figure of 270 books, mostly fiction.

I'm not entirely sure how to track non-fiction, to be honest, because while I'm pretty sure I've read all of, say Early Irish Farming, it's never been cover to cover, but in bits and pieces for reference. Maybe I should do a separate list for "Books I dipped into", or something.

[bedlamsbard]

Yeah, tracking anything where you only read parts of it is really difficult. *sigh* I used to do daily page count tracking, which was useful for that, but stopped a few years ago.

[dhampyresa]

That is a lot of books! Congrats! I love how organised your spreadsheet sounds -- I think I need to try something like that.

[bedlamsbard]

It's been refined over many years of figuring out what works and what doesn't! Which is very clearly evident whenever I go back to look at my older spreadsheets (which generally involves a lot of screaming in frustration).