In March 2012, I signed up for a Goodreads account and discovered that checking books off as read motivated me to compete with myself to read as many as possible. Since 2012 was a partial year, I didn’t do anything with the totals, but now I have a full year of reading data in 2013 to poke, prod, and generally make pivot tables from. (Pivot tables: an occupational hazard)<\/p>\n
*drumroll* The grand total of books either read or listened to in 2013 was…140! Of those, only 11 were rereads\/listens.<\/p>\n
I’ve seen others charting the gender of authors they read this year, so I thought what the heck, why not? Setting aside anthologies and graphic novels for their multiple writers and artists involved (n=17) we’re left with 88 female authors or pennames I didn’t know differently about, one male\/female team, and 34 male. That’s a 78%\/22% split in favor of women, which I find intriguing compared to other people’s totals I’ve read about. Bear in mind, this list is biased inasmuch as it’s simply a collection of books I choose to pick up and finish reading. But I can tell you that I didn’t consciously<\/em> choose any of them based on the author’s gender.<\/p>\n For kicks, I also separated the books by my personal idea of their genre. Interestingly, the gender balance didn’t actually change significantly within any genre, except for ones I didn’t read often, which were subject to statistical weirdnesses. For instance, I love one romance author (Georgette Heyer) and so 8 of my 10 romances read were all by her. Having the romance genre come in as all female (in my sample) is therefore not exactly surprising.<\/p>\n Most populous genres: And the lessons I took from all this were that I read many female authors, as I suspected, and lots of mysteries, which I didn’t. Turning to genres other than the one you write in for pleasure reading: it’s creeping up on me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In March 2012, I signed up for a Goodreads account and discovered that checking books off as read motivated me to compete with myself to read as many as possible. Since 2012 was a partial year, I didn’t do anything with the totals, but now I have a full year of reading data in 2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nMystery: 60 (31 specifically historical mysteries)
\nUrban fantasy: 16<\/p>\n