Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 1: Media Tie-Ins

I first started logging my reading in September 2003, when I left home for college. Twenty years later, I am still doing it; the reading log takes up the first 92 pages of a Word document I have maintained since then. (Pages 93-113 are my "To be read" list.) In that time I have read 2,932 books, for an average of 146.6 per year, 12.2 per month, and one book every 2.5 days. Of course, this has had its ups and downs; as long-term readers of my "year in review" roundups know, in 2016-17 (the year I read for my Ph.D. exams) I peaked at 200 books, whereas in 2019-20 (the year of the global pandemic) I fell to 79.

Something that interests me is how my reading habits have changed over the past twenty years, so I am going to divide my log up into five four-year chunks as a way of peering into that. In this first post, I want to look at media tie-ins, perennially a very large part of my reading diet.

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
Doctor Who	86	51	89½	57	115½	399	13.6%
Star Trek	166	74	10	44	34	328	11.2%
Star Wars	67	50	44	16	0	177	6.0%
Stargate	9	1	0	0	0	10	0.3%
Andromeda	4	0	0	0	0	4	0.1%
Babylon 5	2	0	0	0	0	2	0.1%
Prisoner	2	1	0	0	0	3	0.1%
Sapphire & Steel	0	1	2	0	0	3	0.1%
Planet of the Apes	0	2	1	1	0	4	0.1%
Ghost in the Shell	1	0	0	1	0	2	0.1%
TOTAL	337	180	146½	119	149½	932	31.8%
PCT	61.3%	29.6%	21.8%	19.3%	30.9%	31.8%

2003-07 is my college years; as you can see, media tie-ins then consumed almost two-thirds of my reading! Once I began grad school, that fell off pretty sharply, down to about 20%, with a slight rebound in my last four-year period. College was key for me diversifying my reading: I was exposed to a lot of new stuff, which I then began reading, especially non-genre literature. Grad school of course forced me to read a variety of stuff.

Another factor is that many tie-in lines contracted around that era: Star Trek has gone from publishing twenty-four books per year to twelve to eight to, now, seemingly two. Star Wars and Doctor Who didn't fall off as drastically, but they did. Plus, my interest in tie-ins has gone down a lot: while in college, I would happily buy a Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda novel, I cannot imagine doing such a thing now, and actually, typing this up is making me wonder if I should get rid of the ones I do have. Will I ever reread my Andromeda or Stargate novels? Seems pretty doubtful.

Some notes on individual lines:

• Doctor Who has remained pretty steady, but it definitely got a boost from my 2020-23 project to read all my Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels. That's over with now, though, so I anticipate this will decline to earlier levels.
• Star Trek: It is honestly pretty flabbergasting to me that there was a four-year period where I read only ten Star Trek books! I don't think eighteen-year-old me could have dreamed of such a thing.
• Star Wars books have seen a pretty sharp fall off. Again, I don't think eighteen-year-old me would have dreamed of a four-year period where I read none! You might infer that I say, hated the sequel movies or something, but this predated that. Even before the "Expanded Universe" became "Legends" I was already becoming more choosy about my Star Wars book purchases, having not enjoyed Legacy of the Force. I do have 85 Star Wars books in my "To read" collection on LibraryThing (many of them Dark Horse comics I bought before they lost the license), I just haven't got to them on my reading list yet. I haven't bought any Disney-era tie-ins yet, though—there are still a few old EU books I want that I haven't picked up!

I think this will be a series of monthly or so posts until I get through all my books. We'll see how long I stay interested in it...