Reading Roundup Year in Review 2020/21

As always, I treat my "reading year" as running from September through August, so it's now time to do my annual statistical analysis. Keen followers may recall that last year was the worst reading year of my adult life, by a pretty strong margin. (65.3% of my previous low.) So how did I do this year?

Not that bad! I mean, it's definitely on the low end (my mean is 148), but it's not even my second-worst year.

Here's how my reading this year broke down by category: (I typically only break out a series or author if I read more than one in the past year)

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Doctor Who1	42½	3.5	33.2%
Star Trek	12	1.0	9.4%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	54½	4.5	42.6%
The Expanse1	4	0.3	3.1%
Oz	3	0.3	2.3%
Octavia E. Butler1,2	2	0.2	1.6%
Other SF&F	35	2.9	27.3%
General SF&F Subtotal	44	3.7	34.4%
The Transformers	5	0.4	3.9%
Justice Society of America	2	0.2	1.6%
Other DC Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.3%
Marvel Universe Comics	2½	0.2	2.0%
Avatar: The Last Airbender	2	0.2	1.6%
Other Comics	4	0.3	3.1%
Comics Subtotal	18½	1.5	14.5%
James Bond by Ian Fleming	2	0.2	1.6%
Victorian Literature	2	0.2	1.6%
Other Literature	3	0.3	2.3%
General Literature Subtotal	7	0.6	5.5%
Nonfiction Subtotal	4	0.3	3.1%

1. Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
2. Nonfiction about a particular author I typically count under that author.

Huge amount of Doctor Who books this year. That's because I read a comic book every day over breakfast, and this year, I've been working my way through some Titan Doctor Who trade paperbacks. At 4-6 issues per collection, you can rack up some good numbers fast! At the same time, I've been reading through my Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels.

Here's how those breakdowns have changed over time:

Apparently, I haven't read a Star Wars book in over two years! As always, the thing I regret is that I don't seem to be reading much non-sf... but you can't read more of everything, I guess!

This year, I can do more graphs than normal, since LibraryThing recently upgraded its visualization tools. Here, for example, is how my books break down by original publication date:

I find some of their visualization choices odd, and the charts don't always interpret the original data correctly (I did not read a book published between 10 and 19, nor did I read one from the 1630s).

I enjoy the author ones especially... though my gender one isn't so hot this year! (I blame all the tie-ins.)

I don't know if they mean to, but I hope LT develops this stuff more—I'd love to see a way to graph some of this data over time, for example. But for now, it is pretty neat.

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)