It’s July 1st and the year is now half over. I’m sure you’ve seen my reading metrics for 2012 prior to this, and yes, I’ll be doing a post with that level of detail at the end of this year. For now, though, let’s do a quick progress check on the ol’ reading metrics and see where shit’s at.
Book goal: 50, per my Goodreads account.
Current books read: 22
Current number of pages read: 7627
I’m behind the curve to hit my goal for total number of books this year (50), but I am on-pace to beat 2012 and fucking crush my 2013 reading volume.
Genre Breakdown, Thus Far
Overall, things are much more balanced than previous years. Science fiction, unsurprisingly, takes a large chunk of the genre category, though nowhere 2012, which saw 82% of my reading being science fiction.
For the first half of 2014, science fiction only accounted for 40.9% of my reading (by title count, not page count). Business was second at 22.9%. Those two combined accounted for two-thirds of my reading (again, by title) for the first half of 2014.
Format, Series, and Re-Reads
Format: 100% of the books have been in e-book format
Series: 31.8% of the books have been part of a series
Re-Reads: 18.2% of the books I’ve read thus far have been re-reads
While 18% may seem like a high number of re-reads, it’s important to note that I’ve only read 22 books this year, so far. Additionally, all of the re-reads were ones I had last cracked open back between 1992 and 1997. Seriously. As for series being so strong, I got sucked into Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which I highly recommend, and one of the re-reads was a Star Wars trilogy (the Thrawn Trilogy) — so it did double-duty in skewing the metrics a bit.
Awards
Best Book So Far: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
The Rest of the Year
In early January, I’ll be publishing a full-on analysis of 2014’s reading, including all the nifty graphs (and then some) that were included with my 2012 analysis. I suspect I’ll still be reading a ton of science fiction, but I do plan to try to keep things fairly balanced.