Books Read in 2016
Do you all use Goodreads?
I do. My handle on Goodreads is N.E. White (if you want to hook up).
If you are good (heh, pun intended) about listing your reads on Goodreads, the site provides a handy little end-of-year summary on what you’ve read. Here’s a link to mine.
If you don’t want to click-through, here are the stats:
I read 23 books (some of those were collections) which included 6,351 pages of text. If we figure 250 words per page, that’s 1,587,750 words.
Damn.
And that’s not including all the other reading I do (unpublished manuscripts, newspapers, emails, blogs, signs while I’m driving, etc.).
Double damn. I’m a reading machine! (Until I compare my reading habits to other readers… )
Anyway, the shortest book I read in 2016 was only 47 pages long. It’s called Dark Matters: Absences by Andrew Leon Hudson. This collection only includes two stories, but they are very interesting glimpses into dying worlds. Very much worth a read. I just noticed I didn’t review the stories. I’ll have to correct that in 2017.
The longest book I read in 2016 was a hefty 468 pages long. That one was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. This is an incredible story about identity and loss in a fantastical world you will not be able to forget. It deserved the Hugo award it won.
Of the books I read, the most universally popular was Good Omen by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (481,761 other people also read this book – according to Goodreads).
Only because it is new, the least popular was Hand of Glory by Susan Boulton (2 other folks read it).
I’ve talked about this over on the SFFWorld.com forum, but my ratings are heavily skewed to the ‘Love it’ side of things as I don’t rate/review books I don’t like. Hell, I don’t even finish books I don’t like, so kind of hard to rate/review them if I don’t finish ’em. Consequently, my average book rating for 2016 is 3.9 stars (out of five).
Interesting. Does that mean I’m a fluff reviewer?
If I had rated all the books I didn’t like (or finished), my average rating would be, of course, much lower. Would an average rating of 3.0 show that I’m a fair reviewer?
Not sure what the solution for this is (or whether a solution is needed), but something that kind of bugs me.
Anyway, among the books I read, the one with the highest rating on Goodreads is Hand of Glory (the one that was also least popular) by Susan Boulton. With an average rating of 4.5, I suspect Hand of Glory tops all the others because so few people have read it. (By the way, you should read it. Interesting story with a severed hand traipsing about the English countryside.)
That was my reading year. How was yours?
Filed under: Reading Tagged: 2016, GoodReads, reading, reading statistics
