Reading Roundup Year in Review, 2021/22

My "reading year" runs September through August, so whenever September rolls around, I crunch the statistics on the previous year. I hit a big slump in 2019/20 for some reason, but was pulling out of it in 2021/22. Did that continue?

It did! One hundred forty-one is below my yearly average of 147 as an adult, but not by much.

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 Who*	34	2.8	24.1%
Star Trek	1	0.1	0.7%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	35	2.9	24.8%
Oz / L. Frank Baum	26	2.2	18.4%
Philip K. Dick	3	0.3	2.1%
The Expanse	2	0.2	1.4%
Other SF&F	35	2.9	24.8%
General SF&F Subtotal	66	5.5	46.8%
Kieron Gillen	10	0.8	7.1%
Justice Society of America	6	0.5	4.3%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.4%
Other DC Universe Comics	5	0.4	3.5%
The Transformers	2	0.2	1.4%
James Bond	2	0.2	1.4%
Other Comics	4	0.3	2.8%
Comics Subtotal	31	2.6	22.0%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.7%
Other Literature	1	0.1	0.7%
General Literature Subtotal	2	0.2	1.4%
Nonfiction Subtotal	7	0.6	5.0%

* 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.

Like last year, I read a large number of Doctor Who books, and for the same reason: I was simultaneously reading an issue of a Titan Doctor Who comic over breakfast, and I've been reading about one Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel a month. I finish the Titan stuff this year, though, so those numbers should go down a bit.

Big increase in SF&F, entirely due to reading the Oz books with my son. In fact, my number of "Other SF&F" books is the exact same as last year's! Thank the Wizard for his continued interest; my overall numbers would be much lower without it.

On the other hand, I am doing very badly at reading outside of genre.

Here's how those breakdowns have changed over time:

Doctor Who aside, my tie-in fiction reading has very much gone down... but so had my reading of Victorian literature! Bit of a boost to "other comics" this year.

As I did last year, I can provide some charts via LibraryThing visualization tools. Here, for example, is how my books break down by original publication date:

You can see the influence of the Oz books here on the 1940-49 bar. Compare the much smaller bar for the century's second half! Of course LT is guessing on this, or in some cases, not getting it at all, but I think it provides a good approximation. Here are their author breakdowns:

Note that these break down by author, not book; 13.9% of the authors I read this year were dead, for example, but 25.7% of the books I read this year were by dead writers (mostly L. Frank Baum, of course).

Lastly, here's one of my favorite stats; how many books are listed on my "To be read" list:

You'll see I've gotten decent at holding it to a slight increase since about 2015. From 2005 to 2015, I added a hundred books every eighteen months or so, but since 2015, I haven't even added a hundred books. (Will it ever go down for a protracted period of time? Ha!) Of course, I've acquired a lot of books in that time. They just haven't all ended up on my "To be read" list—they might have gone straight into my "Currently reading," for example.

Here's the size of my actual library over time:

The slope is leveling off... right? Right?

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, 2020/21. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)

Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of when I started tracking reading statistics. Stay tuned for a whopper!