My Reading Year

I’ve mentioned how I keep records of the books I read. Well, I date my “reading year” from October 14 to October 13 of the following year. That’s because my birthday is on the 14th so it corresponds to my actual number of years alive. I’m about to finish out the current reading period and thought I might share the results.

The 2008/2009 period was a good reading year for me and I read more than average. I estimated that I first started truly reading at around 7, so counting from that age I’ve averaged about 76 books a year. I believe the actual average should be higher because I didn’t keep records until I was a teenager, and didn’t keep accurate records until my 20s. But hey, the exact number isn’t that important.

For this past year, I’ve read 124 books. This includes 18 nonfiction works, almost all having to do with science, 15 westerns, 18 thrillers, 18 SF, and 17 fantasy. I’ve also read 11 young adult books, including the Harry Potter series, and then smaller numbers in horror, classics, and poetry.

In the past, I almost never reread books, but as I’ve gotten older I’m doing so more frequently. I only started a record column for reread books about 8 years ago, and this year I set a new record with 6. Several of these I reread in order to blog accurately about them for Forgotten Book Friday.

The Harry Potter books, especially the last five, were definitely among my favorite reads of this past year. Also notable was the graphic novel The Watchmen, which is by far the best graphic novel I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read many). My favorite mystery/thriller of the year was What Angels Fear, the first Sebastian St. Cyr mystery, by our own C. S. Harris. In SF, the Cap Kennedy series of Space Opera stories were an interesting discovery, and in fantasy it would be “The Best of Robert E. Howard series, although most of the stories there were rereads. In nonfiction, the best book I read was probably The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, which I talked about a lot on my blog.

So there you have it. Soon a new reading year will dawn, and the possibilities are…endless. Hurray!
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