20 years of reading- what books am I reading?

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. But overall these make sense to me. 

Then children's/YA and historical fiction, which is interesting. I am also unsurprised that I read so few horror books- I'm sure it only beat out poetry since I rarely sit down and read a whole book of poems.

Also of the non-fiction I read, a third was auto/biographical. Honestly looking more closely, it was all autobiography or memoir. I think memoirs have a lot of really interesting variation- the memoirs on my list include cookbooks, comic books and In the Dream House- which alternates genres by chapter and includes a choose-you-own-adventure section.

Age

I wanted to know- how old are the books that I've been reading? Ideally, I'd like to read a variety of things from a variety of time periods. In practice, I feel like I am increasingly reading things that have come out quite recently and everyone is talking about (or at least that are positioned invitingly on the new release stands at libraries and bookshops).

So how old is the oldest book I've read? At over a thousand years old, it's Sei Shonagan's The Pillow Book from c. 1000 AD. I really enjoyed this too! Rounding out the top three are Njal's Saga from 1280 and Paradise Lost from 1667. But I read those in 2011, 2003 and 2005. Am I right that I'm reading more recent books lately? Pretty much! Although maybe it's turning around a bit?

I looked at the median age of the books that I was reading each year- it dipped down to an all-time low of 1 year in 2019, but it's come up a bit and has been 3 years in 2022 and 2023 (it even hit 4 years in 2020!). For some reason it hit a high of 31.5 in 2008, I think influenced by a whole bunch of Agatha Christie reads that year. I'd really like to vary things up a bit more- but I think a large part of the shift has been down to time and energy. It's often easier to grab a recent release- they're more readily available, sometimes older books can be more challenging language-wise (though really that depends on the books of course) and they are more visible when you're thinking of what to read. One big challenge I have is coming across earlier 20th century titles that sound intriguing- but are impossible to find in the library. Ah well, it will be interesting to see if this trend turns around in the next 20 years!

Geography

Where do all these books come from? Well, a lot of them come from English speaking countries. Only 7% of all the books I read were read in translation, the rest were originally published in English. Looking at the nationality of the author, I did read books from 39 countries*.  That's out of hundreds of countries in the world though, I'm sure I can do better! I haven't even read anything from Korea.

Looking at the top most-read countries on the list, it's no surprise that the English speaking ones dominate. Over 40% of all those books are from the UK! Followed by the US, Australia, Canada and Ireland. Somehow France has snuck in ahead of New Zealand though. The rest of the list is: Japan, Italy, India, Mexico, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile, Nigeria, Sweden, Colombia, Finland, Iran, Spain, Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, South Africa, Argentina, Austria, China, Denmark, Germany, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Zimbabwe. Plenty of places left to explore- please do recommend me a book from somewhere not on this list!

One more blog post left in this series I think- about the authors.

*Though another data caveat- this is my categorisation. I decided to assign one country to each book- but this is not often reflective of an author's life. People are born in one place, move to others, hold dual citizenship and different identities in their lives. So my decisions are imperfect. Some examples- what about an author who was born in Ireland, moved to Australia as an adult and lives here now, but writes books set in Ireland? Or conversely if an author moved from the US to Ireland at university, lives in Ireland and writes books set it Ireland? (I classified both of these as 'Ireland'). Or a writer who was born and lives in the US, whose family background is Nigerian, travels frequently to Nigeria and sets their books in Nigeria? (I classified them as 'US'). So this is for my own interest but in no way definitive.