Logging the Books

Ever since I was a kid, I have kept a book log, listing all the books I've read, similar in many ways to what Pamela Paul writes about here. A few years ago, I also started a spreadsheet, an online book log which has made it easier to track certain things, like totals and categories.

For example, I can easily tally how many books I read in a given year. In 2018, I read a total of 100 books (that's compared to 90 for 2017 and 107 for 2016). Of those books, for 2018, 45 were novels--less than half. I think of myself as mostly reading novels, but the numbers think differently: for 2017, I read 32 novels (out of 90, that's just a little over a third), and for 2016, I read 38 (out of 107; again, about a third). If I broaden the category to fiction and include short stories, comics, and drama, the number for 2018 goes up to 80 out of 100--an easy-to-calculate 80% (duh--numbers have never been my strong suit.) So maybe I should think of myself as primarily a fiction reader. Well, I knew that already, but it's a bit of meaningless fun to look at the figures.

Another interesting figure: out of the 100 books I read in 2018, 32 were rereads. For 2017, 16 out of the 90 total were rereads, and for 2016, only 9 out of 107. So my rereading seems to be on an upward trend--we'll see how that pans out this year. I am a huge proponent of rereading---I know there are so many great books out there, but so many books do reward second (and third, and fourth...) rereadings, and my reading plan for this year, as for all years, includes many return readings.