What's with today, today?

Onto the final post in this short series! Where we find out: who are the writers of these books? Well, for starters, they are mostly women. Overall, 60% of the books I read were written by women (and that doesn't count those that were written by both men and women). But I had a hypothesis that this had changed over time- that I started off reading more books by men but now a large majority of the books I read are written by women. Time to test it out with a graph! And the graph shows that is broadly true (for reference, the 'other' category includes books written by a combination of genders, books were the authors gender is unknown, and non-binary authors). In 2003 61% of the books I read were written by men- and for the next 5 years it hovered around 50/50. In 2010 the proportion written by women started to climb, and many years after that it's hovered around 60% women (though there were a few 50/50 years in 2012, 2016 and 2017). The most gender-unbalanced year was 201...

Now for the interesting bits- what were the actual books that I read? What were they like? It's hard to summarise of course, but I'll do my best. Genre Probably surprising no-one, 90% of the books I read were fiction. Or 89% if you exclude poetry. I wasn't sure which genre would end up top though- I was a big fantasy reader, read an increasing number of murder mysteries (though still love fantasy!) as well as literary fiction, and generally like to read a bunch of different things. I classified the books by genre- but some things fit in more than one category, so they're not mutually exclusive. And some things are hard to define! Genre boundaries are slippery. But this is what I came up with. Feel free to disagree with these categories. Literary fiction, Crime and Fantasy are practically tied at the top there, with literary fiction just ahead. Literary fiction is perhaps the hardest genre to define (it can get contentious!) but I'm interested that it came out on top...

 I realised last year that I started keeping a record of the books I read way back in 2003- which means that 2023 marked 20 years of tracking my books! Also equalling my whole adult life. I started writing them down in the back of my year planner, then added them to my blog as well, and then moved from pen and paper to Librarything and then Goodreads. Sadly in the pen and paper era I managed to completely lose 2009, so now at the end of 2023 (technically now we are in the start of 2024 I know) I have 20 years worth of lists. I thought that I should mark the occasion somehow, and what better way than to put all those books into a spreadsheet and run some numbers? Maybe make a few graphs? Can't think of anything better! The numbers So this is the big question, I guess, how many books did I manage to read in 20 years? I think this needs a little introduction... So way back in 2003 I really wanted to keep track of which books I had read and hadn't read. But it seemed vain to me to ...

Happy new year to all! As is tradition, here's a round up of last year's reading. It's a pretty long list (for me) this year, 75 books, but the numbers feel a little arbitrary- this includes a couple of books I read to my kids, but not the super short ones, where is the cut off line anyway? And as always it doesn't include re-reads. I don't think I had many re-reads, apart from getting to read The Secret Garden, Ballet Shoes and The Borrowers to the kids. Excited for even more to come! Shortest book Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, a novel made up of a series of short and very strange vignettes about a man and his best friends, also their relationships and the main character's struggle to have a baby. But also aquariums, weasels, snow storms and soup. It's an unsettling book but also in a way mundane. Longest book   Stories from the Little Beach Street Bakery: An Omnibus Edition by Jenny Colgan. A cozy romance comfort read that I enjoyed very much-...