Self-analysis of books & magazines read in 2005

Finally managed to compile a list of items I read in 2005. It started off as a simple list but after reading some other librarians' blogs (I forgot which ones), I noticed they included an analysis of the types of materials read, subjects etc. Pretty useful so I decided to take a bit more time to compile the list.

Summary as follows:

• Total items read in 2005 = 91 items
• Fiction Vs Non-fiction = 79% Fiction Vs. 21% Non-fiction
• Subject composition (top 3 in terms of %) = Fantasy 23%, Science Fiction 23% (21 items each); Society/ Contemporary Fiction 15% (14 items); Military 4%, Art 4%, Science 4% (4 items each)
  
• Items from Singapore Collection = 9 (10% of total read)
• Formats = Books 48% (44 books), Magazines 12% (11 magazines), Graphic Novels 40% (36 graphic novels)
• Value of items as per Amazon.com prices (excluding Out of Print items) = USD$1,019.13 (or SGD$1,654.35, as at 28 Feb 06 conversion rates)

I'm glad I took time to analyse my reading list. For one, it's apparent that I read a lot less Business-related materials compared to last two years.

Comics/ Graphic Novels made up 40% of total items read. I knew I read alot more Graphic Novels than previous years but I didn't know it was that much! In 2005, I deliberately picked Graphic Novels as a sort of informal "genre self-study". I must have enjoyed them so much that I read more and more of them. They were easy-reading materials (work was particularly stressful last

Fantasy and Science Fiction was still my choice of Fiction genres. I used the term "Society/Comtemporary Fiction" to broadly categorise works of fiction that dealt with social issues (maybe I need to delve deeper since the term could be too broad for analysis).

Out of curiosity, I decided to find out the value of the items (using Amazon.com as the guage), and it came up to be just over USD$1,000. Without our public libraries, I would never have read this much in terms of quantity and monetary value (and this dollar amount is just the purchase price, nevermind the intangible value of the ideas and leisure derived from them).

Another observation for 2005 -- I definitely read less books compared to previous years (excluding Graphic Novels), and one big reason was Blogging and reading RSS feeds. Looking at the books read per month, there was a huge gap from Jan to Mar 2005. My readings only picked up from April 2005 onwards.

Hardly surprising. Blogging and reading RSS feeds takes up whatever time available for reading. However I don't see this as a bad thing since my Reading Diet is a heck of alot richer now that it's supplemented by blogs, and by writing/ blogging.

Parting question - I wonder if other bloggers also find that they are reading less than before, because they are spending some of that time blogging.


Tag: reading