book statistics
Apr. 10th, 2025 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI went to enter some Hugo finalists on my big list of books/other media, and realized that I've reached 2000 lines! That's a big round number and I have decided to celebrate by counting things!
I started keeping my list in its present format on Google Sheets in the summer of 2016, migrating from an earlier text-file list. In theory, nothing ever comes off the list, allowing me to track not only things I might read, but things I have read and things that I've concluded I don't ever want to read but had thought at one point I might.
Of the 2000, 675, or just about a third, are labeled as read, roughly 75 works a year. I can't quite conclude that I end up reading a third of the books that interest me, because the list doesn't include anything that I *did* read between 2009 and 2016, but does include everything I added in that period that I hadn't read by 2016. So far in 2025 I've added 67 and read six of them - but I'm usually reading "behind" new additions (which often aren't even out yet). Picking 2020 as a more representative year, I added 149 of which I have by now read 69, or a bit under half. 118 of the 2000 are labeled as "nope", which includes books I started and decided not to finish, books I decided I never wanted to start in the first place (often because I read something else by the author that I disliked enough to avoid them entirely), and a few entries I removed for other reasons, like I wrote down a trilogy name but later made separate entries for the individual volumes, or a book was announced but never came out. So, if I never added anything else to my list, I would have about 16 years worth of stuff left to read. (To be clear, I don't particularly aspire to do that - I would much rather read higher-priority new list additions than lower-priority old ones, and will probably eventually "nope" more of the old ones for better sorting. There are also 80 entries that aren't classified at all, some of which will likely go straight to "nope" if I ever get around to classifying them.)
More about what's in there: 37 are labeled as "other", which includes picture books, parenting books and other self-help, nonfiction, and cookbooks. In practice I almost never think to read from the "other" category - there seem to be 10 formerly-other picture books I marked as read, and a few parenting books I moved to "nope", but if I'm ever going to read any of that nonfiction I'm probably going to have to reclassify it to normal priority numbers or come up with some kind of personal annual nonfiction reading event.
154 entries list their author as "movie", of which 35 are labeled as read. By eyeball, the movies have both a high proportion of being uncategorized, and a high proportion of having been added to the list before 2016, suggesting that I have actually learned that I don't watch a lot of movies and have become more selective about adding them.
Priorities: I currently have (unread) 10 priority 1, 37 priority 2, 411 priority 3, 617 priority 4. Of books I've read, I have read 70 priority 1 (plus 4 that got bumped up from 2>1 or 3>1; 11% of books read), 198 priority 2 (plus 21 3>2 and 2 4>2; 33% of books read), 261 priority 3 (plus 4 4>3; 39% of books read), 53 priority 4 (8%) and 46 that I read without ever having had them on the list or listed but never gave a priority (7%). Or looked at another way, of all books that ever reached priority 1, I've read 88% of them; of all books that reached priority 2, I've read 86%, of all books that reached a 3, I've read 39%, and of all priority 4 books, I've read 8%.
So that was interesting. Probably not to anybody else, but it was to me. I feel motivated to go do some classifying/reclassifying, anyways. :)
I started keeping my list in its present format on Google Sheets in the summer of 2016, migrating from an earlier text-file list. In theory, nothing ever comes off the list, allowing me to track not only things I might read, but things I have read and things that I've concluded I don't ever want to read but had thought at one point I might.
Of the 2000, 675, or just about a third, are labeled as read, roughly 75 works a year. I can't quite conclude that I end up reading a third of the books that interest me, because the list doesn't include anything that I *did* read between 2009 and 2016, but does include everything I added in that period that I hadn't read by 2016. So far in 2025 I've added 67 and read six of them - but I'm usually reading "behind" new additions (which often aren't even out yet). Picking 2020 as a more representative year, I added 149 of which I have by now read 69, or a bit under half. 118 of the 2000 are labeled as "nope", which includes books I started and decided not to finish, books I decided I never wanted to start in the first place (often because I read something else by the author that I disliked enough to avoid them entirely), and a few entries I removed for other reasons, like I wrote down a trilogy name but later made separate entries for the individual volumes, or a book was announced but never came out. So, if I never added anything else to my list, I would have about 16 years worth of stuff left to read. (To be clear, I don't particularly aspire to do that - I would much rather read higher-priority new list additions than lower-priority old ones, and will probably eventually "nope" more of the old ones for better sorting. There are also 80 entries that aren't classified at all, some of which will likely go straight to "nope" if I ever get around to classifying them.)
More about what's in there: 37 are labeled as "other", which includes picture books, parenting books and other self-help, nonfiction, and cookbooks. In practice I almost never think to read from the "other" category - there seem to be 10 formerly-other picture books I marked as read, and a few parenting books I moved to "nope", but if I'm ever going to read any of that nonfiction I'm probably going to have to reclassify it to normal priority numbers or come up with some kind of personal annual nonfiction reading event.
154 entries list their author as "movie", of which 35 are labeled as read. By eyeball, the movies have both a high proportion of being uncategorized, and a high proportion of having been added to the list before 2016, suggesting that I have actually learned that I don't watch a lot of movies and have become more selective about adding them.
Priorities: I currently have (unread) 10 priority 1, 37 priority 2, 411 priority 3, 617 priority 4. Of books I've read, I have read 70 priority 1 (plus 4 that got bumped up from 2>1 or 3>1; 11% of books read), 198 priority 2 (plus 21 3>2 and 2 4>2; 33% of books read), 261 priority 3 (plus 4 4>3; 39% of books read), 53 priority 4 (8%) and 46 that I read without ever having had them on the list or listed but never gave a priority (7%). Or looked at another way, of all books that ever reached priority 1, I've read 88% of them; of all books that reached priority 2, I've read 86%, of all books that reached a 3, I've read 39%, and of all priority 4 books, I've read 8%.
So that was interesting. Probably not to anybody else, but it was to me. I feel motivated to go do some classifying/reclassifying, anyways. :)
