lizbee | Who likes statistics?

I finished one last book for 2012 yesterday: The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho. It's a novella, which made it easy to inhale in a day, but I wouldn't have bothered if it hadn't been terribly funny and engaging. It's the tale of a Malayan-Chinese woman making her way as a writer in 1920 London. That's the bit that sold me; I was less keen on the genre being romance, which I generally find boring. But, you know, novella, it's over quickly. And it was incredibly well-written, contained one of my bulletproof kinks (which is, alas, spoilery), and the heroine is witty and clever and generally delightful.

Now, because I have nothing better to do -- it's not like I should go and rustle up breakfast or anything -- I've opened Excel and am playing with stats.

Total books read in 2012: 141. Some might say I've inflated the total a bit by including graphic novels and novellas, but to those people I say, WHATEVS. Also, I'm really keen on how the ebook explosion has made the novella available to the average reader, no magazine subscriptions required. (At the same time, I'm kicking myself a bit for not asking for a subscription to Kill Your Darlings for Christmas!)

Australian books read: 19. Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaameful. And this is the year I was deliberately trying to consume more Australian literature!

Here's the breakdown by month, in handy graph form:

I was having a whinge the other day about how I hardly read anything in October, but I was still doing better than in June! What happened in June, I wonder? Continuum only took up a weekend. Hmm.

March looks impressive because I read mostly boarding school stories that month, which take about an hour to read cover to cover.

Here's a breakdown of genre:

In short, 2012 was heavily dominated by YA and crime fiction. I'M OKAY WITH THAT, ACTUALLY. The only non-YA fantasy I read was by George R. R. Martin, and I'm pretty okay with that as well.

I was looking at this graph and thinking, "Yes, but YA is really a sales category, not a genre. I SHOULD DIVIDE THAT SECTION FURTHER. So here's YA broken down into genre:

Once again, boarding school stories are distorting the results somewhat.

I just want to point out that of the seven YA science fiction novels I read, one was not set in a dystopia. Get it together, YA SF!

Then -- look, by now I'm just procrastinating -- I thought it might be nice to break non-fiction down by genre. SPOILERS: I read a lot of stuff about the '20s. And about TV. When I was a kid I read books about the making of TV shows I didn't even like or watch (which is how I managed to know a fair bit about eras of Doctor Who that predated my birth before I was ever in the fandom), and that hasn't really changed. Except I have less time, so I try to restrict it to shows I actually do enjoy.

Now I'm trying to decide if I should track my reading again for 2013. I enjoyed this exercise, and it didn't take up a whole lot of time. It's quite self-indulgent, but hey, it's the internet! WHAT ELSE IS IT FOR?