The Year in Books and the Year Without Books

Last December, I looked around my living room and noticed that I had a problem. There were unread books under both end tables, and under the coffee table. While this has been pretty normal for my living room the entire time that I've lived in this apartment, a new development was troubling me: there were also multiple stacks of unread books next to the coffee table, enough of them to reach the height of the coffee table and extend its length by almost two feet. Those books were there because I ran out of room under the tables.

When was I going to read these books?

And why was I still buying more books, pretty much every weekend?

I decided that I needed to address the situation, so I made a New Year's Resolution: I would not buy any books in 2018. I needed to read books and get them out of the apartment, so I made myself some rules.

1) I could buy one book during the year. I knew I would need an out at some point during the year, but, unfortunately for me, I burned my one book before the end of January, when I found out that Chad Michael Murray, the actor, wrote a book with Heather Graham, a legitimate author.

I regret nothing, because this book was a hilarious shitshow.

American Drifter introduced us to River Roulet, a young US army veteran trying to put the horrors of war behind him by backpacking through Brazil. While in Rio, he meets a beautiful woman, but she is the girlfriend of a powerful drug lord who rules Rio with an iron fist. So River and Natal, the beautiful woman, are on the run from the henchmen of her drug dealer boyfriend. They take trains and busses and hide in abandoned houses, but the men always seem to find them and River and Natal keep getting separated but their love is so strong that they always find each other again even in the extremely crowded streets of Rio.

Except that there is no Natal.

I know I'm not supposed to laugh, but Natal was his wife who was killed while he was deployed with the army. They always wanted to go to Brazil, so when he gets discharged for PTSD he goes, drops off the grid to become a handsome drifter, and the entire book is just his PTSD hallucination. The men constantly chasing him are the private investigators his parents hired to find him. In the end they take him back to America and he is institutionalized.

Except he also actually really did fight a Brazilian drug lord. And burned down his heavily armed compound. While hallucinating that he was rescuing Natal.

2) My other exception was that I was allowed to buy any copy of Joan Crawford's My Way of Life, because I've been looking for that thing for years and I was not about to pass it up. In August, I found out that with the popularity of Feud someone put the book back into print, so I ordered one, but haven't read it yet.

Other than those two books, I only slipped one time during the whole year. I was in Pittsburgh in October for a conference, and I spotted this for fifty cents in a bin at a comic store:



How could I not want that?

Yes, I broke my resolution, but I guarantee that book is worth it.

I made a second book-related resolution this year, which was to keep track of the books that I read and data about them in a spreadsheet, so that I could draw a picture of my reading habits at the end of the year. I usually just keep a running list of summaries, but I was curious about what this could tell me, and started tracking on January 1. I used the following columns on my spreadsheet:

1) Title
2) Author
3) Author Sex
4) Publication Year
5) Format
6) Author Race
7) Days Spent Reading
8) Fiction/Nonfiction
9) Stars Out of Five
10) Genre
11) Page Count
12) How Was it Acquired?
13) Any Awards?

So, what did we learn?

Title and Author I read 51 books this year. This is low for me, but there was a period from late July to late August where I just stopped reading. I stopped doing a lot of things about halfway through the year, like updating this blog regularly, staying on diet, getting all my steps regularly, and eventually reading for fun, but by November I was turning most of that around. Hopefully that means I will be back to my normal reading levels soon.

Author Sex If I couldn't find a record of the author self-identifying, I went with the one that they appeared to be. I may have misgendered someone, for which I apologize, but statistics allow a margin of error, so it doesn't matter much one way or the other if I got a few wrong. Two of the books I read this year had multiple authors, so I have 53 authors for 51 books. Of those 53 authors, I read 20 women and 33 men. It's not an even split, but it's not horribly out of balance. Maybe I'll try alternating this year, to see if I can get it more even.

Publication Year I'm not sure why I thought this was information that I needed to track, but 47 books were published in this century, and 4 were published in the last one. The oldest book I read was published in 1955.

Format I didn't finish a single book on my Kindle this year, and I don't listen to audiobooks, so my only formats are paperback and hardcover. I read 14 hardcovers and 37 paperbacks.

Author Race Like the category of Author Sex, I did my best with this one. While I have 1 unknown, the majority of authors I read this year appeared to be white. And when I say the majority, I mean 47 out of 53. I need to make a more conscious effort this year to seek out voices other than white ones.

Days Spent Reading It takes me an average of 4.7 days to finish a book.

Fiction or Nonfiction I read 34 works of fiction, and 17 nonfiction.

Stars Out of Five I am apparently somewhat stingy with my stars. Here are the books that I gave five stars to:

Rob Rufus' Die Young With Me

Tina Fey's Bossypants

Margaret Lazarus Dean's Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight

M. R. Carey's The Girl With All the Gifts

Michelle Obama's Becoming

Adam Silvera's They Both Die At The End

That's it. Everything else I read was somehow disappointing in some way, and it cost them at least one star. I didn't read any books that I only gave one star two, but four only got two stars.

Genre Genre was all over the place. The category I read the most of was science fiction, and second place was a tie between horror and memoir. Some people would argue that those are the same category. I tried to mark what a book mainly was, even though several of them would have fit in multiple categories.

Page Count The shortest book I read was 152 pages, and the longest 678. My average page count was 353.

How Was It Acquired? I borrowed one book, and found two in free book piles in the Communications Building hallways. Out of the rest, 25 were gifts, and 23 were books I bought for myself.

Any Awards? This section may also be inaccurate, as it was hard to track down the information. Amazon, GoodReads, Wikipedia, and Google Books are all inconsistent about listing a book's awards, so I did my best to research. As near as I can tell, seven books that I read this year won awards.

I'm planning to track the books this way again this year, and while I am not resolving not to buy any, I am going to be conscious of what I am purchasing and when I actually plan to read it.