Friday, January 01, 2016

2015 shall henceforth be remembered as The Manly Year

First, the count.  I would like to put it in a table, for purposes of comparison, but I can't make one fit.  We'll have push along as best we can.

2015
books started: 108
books finished: 77 (71.3%)
among finished books:
fiction: 53 (68.8%)
nonfiction: 8 (10.4%)
graphic novel: 16 (20.8%)
among finished books:
by male authors: 43 (55.8%)
by female authors: 23 (29.9%)
by male and female co-authors: 11 (14.3%)

Look at those stats!  I typically read about 2/3rds female authors to 1/3rd male authors.  This year is upside down!  It's very startling to me, and the reason 2015 is The Manly Year.
I have a few books that I've started but haven't finished yet, but I haven't decided to put them down forever, so they aren't represented here (maybe 3 books total; I'll lump them in to 2016).

For comparison, here are 2014's numbers:
books started: 60
books finished: 43 (71.7%)
finished books that were fiction: 35 (81.3%)
finished books that were nonfiction: 7 (16.3%)
finished books that were graphic novels: 1 (2.3%)
finished books by female authors: 29 (67.4%)
finished books by male authors: 11 (18.9%)
finished books by male and female authors: 3 (7%)

For fun, I looked at which 2015 posts had the most hits.  The clear winner is this early 2015 post, for some reason, with 54 hits.  I just widdled on about an ancient sci-fi series that I would think would be of interest to very few.  Maybe one person really, really liked it?
Other contenders are my long, in-Hawaii post (49); a random assortment from March (48); this more recent list (46); and another February post, when I was apparently reading more than any other time this year (44).

As for my "resolutions," they were to 1) always have something to write on my "Currently Reading" mug, i.e., to always be actively reading something, and 2) to actually post them up here at least twice a month.  Neither was a complete success-- although I did pretty well always being technically reading something, I did have some periods of funk when not many pages actually turned, and I squeaked by with the minimum 2 posts most months, but utterly failed in June.

For this year, I'm going to challenge myself to complete a 48-hour book challenge.  It probably won't be on the official date, because that has never, ever worked out for me, but I've been toying with the idea for a few days of staking out a weekend on my own to go camping, just me, or picking a few mid-week days in November or March to grab an off-season rate at a BandB, and the more I think about it the more I like it. 

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