Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 6: Nonfiction

Here's the last post of my series that's been celebrating how my reading habits have evolved over two decades. This one will be very short! It covers nonfiction and I (mostly) don't track subcategories when it comes to nonfiction. (I sort of do, in that if I read a nonfiction book about, say, Star Trek, I count it with my Star Trek numbers, not my nonfiction numbers.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
General Nonfiction	27	38	73	46	19	203	6.9%
PCT	4.9%	6.2%	10.8%	7.5%	3.9%	6.9%

What is not very surprising is that my nonfiction peaks in the 2011-15 period, when I was in grad school, and specifically, I am sure it's all down to 2012-13, when I was reading for my doctoral exams, and had to read myriad works of literary criticism and history. I've never read that much nonfiction before or since! I probably should be better about keeping up with my field.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 5: Other Comics

This is the fifth (and penultimate) post in my series breaking down my reading habits over the past two decades, celebrating my two decades of detailed tracking of my own reading. Previously, I did a whole post on DC Comics; this one covers the rest of my comics reading diet. (Note that both posts only count comics that I read as books, i.e., graphic novels and collections. Confusing, comic books are not books, so I don't log them.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
The Transformers	0	0	0	60	13	73	2.5%
Spider-Man	½	1	7	2	0	10½	0.4%
Thor	0	0	0	5	1	6	0.2%
Other Marvel	½	7	8	8	6	28½	1.0%
K. Gillen	0	0	0	0	16	16	0.5%
B. K. Vaughan	0	6	0	9	1	16	0.5%
Avatar	0	0	5	3	3	11	0.4%
A. Moore	0	2	3	5	0	10	0.3%
H. Pekar	0	0	6	2	1	9	0.3%
Calvin & Hobbes	0	0	1	7	0	8	0.3%
K. Straub	1	2	4	0	0	7	0.3%
Scott Pilgrim	0	0	6	0	0	6	0.2%
M. Hagio	0	0	3	2	0	5	0.2%
The Walking Dead	0	0	2	1	1	4	0.1%
Other Comics	2	6	20	15	10	53	1.8%
TOTAL	4	24	65	119	52	264	9.0%
PCT	0.7%	3.9%	9.7%	19.3%	10.6%	9.0%

The peak of my comics reading is basically just the peak of my Transformers comics reading. For a couple years, I read an issue of IDW's Transformers comics over breakfast every day, which was enough to make Transformers rise to 2.5% of my overall reading of the past two decades! Take that out, and the 2015-19 span would see a mere 59 comics read. In grad school, I ILLed a lot of comic books, and those were mostly DC, but occasionally others.

Some specific notes:

• Marvel Comics make up 1.6% of my reading over the past two decades... compare to DC Comics's 13.5%! I guess you can tell which superhero universe I am partial to... (What was the comic I read that I classed as half Spider-Man and half something else? To be honest, I can't be bothered to figure it out.)
  
• Harvey Pekar and Moto Hagio are two writers whose oeuvres I am supposedly working my way through, but clearly that is not happening very quickly!
• Brian K. Vaughan and Kieron Gillen: I would not have guessed I had read the same amount of each writer, given I think of Kieron Gillen as the poor man's Brian K. Vaughan. The Vaughan stats are basically Y: The Last Man, Saga, and Paper Girls; the Gillen are The Wicked + The Divine, Die, and Once & Future. I guess I should go read Ex Machina to boost Vaughan's numbers or something.
• Kristofer Straub: Someday I'll get around to reading chainsawsuit and Broodhollow. Someday...

Just one not very exciting installment of this series left! Nonfiction!

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 4: General Literature

My fourth post in my series about my reading since college covers the category "general literature." This is my catch-all term for what you might also call "mimetic fiction" (and also, say, poetry). That is to say, stories that take place in the world of the reader/writer. This definition obviously excludes science fiction and fantasy, but it does include some genre fiction, like mysteries and espionage. In a world where I read more mystery, I'd probably break it out, but I don't read enough of it to justify that.

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
T. Hardy	1	7	5	1	0	14	0.5%
C. Dickens	1	2	4½	2	4	13½	0.5%
G. Eliot	0	4	4	2	2	12	0.4%
E. Gaskell	0	3	5	0	0	8	0.3%
W. Collins	1	1	3½	2	0	7½	0.3%
C. Kingsley	0	1	3	3	0	7	0.2%
Other Victorian	8	9	32	17	0	66	2.3%
Horatio Hornblower	3	5	0	11	0	19	0.6%
Inspector Lynley	8	3	7	0	0	18	0.6%
James Bond 007	0	0	2	10	6	18	0.6%
F. H. Burnett	0	1	14	0	0	18	0.6%
V. Woolf	1	8	1	0	0	10	0.3%
A. C. Doyle	0	0	7	0	0	7	0.2%
L. Durrell	1	4	1	0	0	6	0.2%
J. Winterson	1	2	1	1	1	6	0.2%
S. Fry	5	0	0	0	0	5	0.2%
Other Literature	56	82	30	27	13	208	7.1%
TOTAL	86	132	120	76	26	440	15.0%
PCT	15.6%	21.7%	17.8%	12.3%	5.4%	15.0%

On average, general lit makes up 15% of my reading diet, but this has ebbed and flowed a lot over the years. It peaked 2007-11, which would be the period I had just come out of college (which substantially reshaped my reading tastes) and was beginning grad school (where I was of course taking a lot of seminars that required me to read a lot of literature). These days it's down to a mere 5%; doing the Hugos has me prioritizing genre reading and, well, something has to give.

Unsurprisingly, the Victorians (the first seven rows on the chart) peak in 2011-15, the time when I read for my comprehensive exams. What did surprise me was to see that other than two books by Eliot and four by Dickens, I have read nothing by a Victorian for four years! Even worse, no Elizabeth Gaskell in eight! What must Tom Recchio think of me?

Some specific notes:

• Charles Dickens clearly benefits from my project to read one Dickens novel every Christmas. I only have a few more to go; I think I might open it up to all the Victorian novels I own but have not read at that point. So I will at least get one per year!
• Horatio Hornblower: I read most of the series just before grad school, but stalled out; I then returned to it years later, starting over, meaning it's the thing I've read more of than any other "literature" series.
• Inspector Lynley Mysteries: For a while, I was working my way through this series, but then I caught up and haven't read any since. Someday I will have to swing back to it and read everything that's come out since I left off.
• James Bond was the focus of my attention for a while, as I read one book every three months or so. Now I've read them all! That said, there's some comics I want to read (and I never did finish the movies), so I really must get back to that.
• Frances Hodgson Burnett: Who would have guessed she'd be one of my top authors!? Blame Tom Recchio, of course.
• Jeanette Winterson: Other than Dickens, Winterson is the only author represented in all five of my four-year segments. So I may not be moving through her work quickly, but I am doing so steadily.

I wish I had more non-sf&f in my rotation... but how I might do this and not shortchange all the other things I wish I read more of, I have no idea.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 3: DC Comics

Here's the third post in my series examining my reading habits over the past twenty years. This one tackles DC Comics. (That is to say, comics and other books set in the DC universe, and nonfiction about it; I'm not counting other comic books published by DC here.)

I almost did all comics in one post, but I decided my stats broke out enough different DC subseries into their own in order to justify a post just for DC. (My usual rule is to break out a series if I read three or more installments of it, in more than one batch.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
Crisis Crossovers	1	3	36½	11	0	51½	1.8%
Batman	1½	4	19⅓	17½	1	43	1.5%
The Sandman	0	27	9	4	1	41	1.4%
Superman	3½	17	5⅓	3½	½	29⅚	1.0%
Legion of Super-Heroes	0	0	8	13½	6	27½	0.9%
Green Arrow	0	21½	3	1	0	25½	0.9%
Birds of Prey	0	0	15	5	0	20	0.7%
Justice Society	0	1	3	0	10	14	0.5%
Manhunter	0	0	0	5	0	5	0.2%
Blue Beetle	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
The Atom	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
Supergirl	0	0	0	2	1	3	0.1%
Other DC Universe	4	20½	59⅓	34½	12½	129⅚	4.4%
TOTAL	10	94	159	102	31	395½	13.5%
PCT	1.8%	15.4%	23.6%	16.6%	6.4%	13.5%

Sorry for all the fractions. You can thank things like Superman/Batman, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman, and Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes.

When I was in grad school, I used to request three comic book collections per month from interlibrary loan, like clockwork on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month. This was enough to keep me moving steadily, but not so much that it dominated my reading... too much, anyway. These were mostly, though not entirely, DC comics. This would have been something like 2009 to 2017, and indeed, those are the peak months for DC in my reading.

As you can see, I read a few different things in those days:

• Crisis Crossovers: I read all (as of then, anyway) DC's "Crisis" crossovers, including tie-ins: Crisis on Multiple Earths, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis. I also would have read some stuff not branded as "Crisis" specifically, but still universe-shattering crossovers; those would just be lumped into the "other DC universe" at the bottom.
• Batman: I read a bunch of "early days" of Batman stuff, working my way from Batman: Year One all the way to Batman: Year 100!
• The Sandman: I started with Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, but then moved on to many tie-ins and spin-offs, like Sandman Mystery Theatre and The Sandman Presents, as well as some of the pre-Gaiman Sandman stuff. Like with Crisis above, "The Sandman" statistic only counts stuff explicitly branded as Sandman; the spin-offs The Dreaming or Dead Boy Detectives, for example, would go under "other DC universe."
• Legion of Super-Heroes: I actually didn't get any Legion comics from ILL... because those I buy! Every six months I read one of my Legion collections. This makes the Legion the only one that really persists beyond when I left UConn in 2017.
• Green Arrow was actually the first superhero I read methodically via ILL. After my friend James loaned me the two Kevin Smith collections, I just kept going. At a certain point I had read every single post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint Green Arrow trade paperback, but I think they've collected some of Mike Grell's stuff since.
• Birds of Prey: Green Arrow introduced me to Black Canary and made me a fan for life, so after finishing with him, I moved on to her, including her co-starring role in this series.
• Justice Society is the DC series other than Legion I've read recently. I am mostly reading it in single issues, but I have picked up a few collections over the past few years.

These days, I read much less DC, and I am trying to buy much less, too, though there are some of their omnibus lines I try to keep up with. I do read an issue of some comic book every morning over breakfast, but since most of those aren't actually "books" per se, they don't get captured by my reading statistics. So having peaked at 2 DC comic collections per month, I'm now down to one every two months.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 2: General Science Fiction & Fantasy

Here's the second in my series of posts looking at how my reading habits have changed over time. This one covers science fiction and fantasy that is neither tie-ins nor comic books. In the Excel sheet I'm basing these posts on, I break out authors; some authors of course write both sf&f and non-genre literature. For the purposes of these posts, I'm placing authors in the category where the majority of their work that I've read falls. For example, M. T. Anderson and H. G. Wells write sf&f and literature and even nonfiction, but most of their work that I've read is sf&f, so I'm including them in this post.

Note that I only break out an author when I purposefully read three books by that author and I intend to read more. That is to say, if I read four John Scalzi novels not because they were by Scalzi, but only because they were Hugo finalists, I don't see that as worth tracking. I also include relevant nonfiction and comics with an author's count; a book about H. G. Wells is included in my Wells count, so too would be a comic adaptation of The War of the Worlds. (As that also implies, derivative works are also lumped in with that author; a Gregory Benford Foundation novel would go with Asimov's total.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
L. F. Baum / Oz	0	7	1	13	41	62	2.1%
H. G. Wells	0	7	10	15	3	35	1.2%
U. K. Le Guin	7	0	8	5	4	24	0.8%
The Expanse	0	0	0	8	10	18	0.6%
L. Snicket / D. Handler	13	2	1	0	0	16	0.5%
T. Pratchett	0	0	0	2	12	14	0.5%
I. Asimov / Foundation	2	10	2	0	0	14	0.5%
M. T. Anderson	2	5	2	3	2	14	0.5%
J. R. R. Tolkien	0	1	10	0	1	12	0.4%
S. Lem	6	2	2	1	0	11	0.4%
Pern	0	1	0	0	10	11	0.4%
Lensmen	6	4	0	0	0	10	0.3%
O. Butler	5	0	0	2	3	10	0.3%
His Dark Materials	0	8	0	1	1	10	0.3%
T. Pierce	0	8	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Duane	8	0	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Lessing	1	6	0	0	0	7	0.2%
N. Okorafor	0	0	0	5	2	7	0.2%
D. Gerrold	5	1	0	0	0	6	0.2%
A. Leckie	0	0	0	4	2	6	0.2%
G. Griffith	0	2	4	0	0	6	0.2%
Hyperion Cantos	2	0	1	3	0	6	0.2%
P. K. Dick	1	1	0	0	4	6	0.2%
The Dark Is Rising	5	0	0	0	0	5	0.2%
Y. H. Lee	0	0	0	4	1	5	0.2%
N. Novik	0	0	0	1	4	5	0.2%
I. Calvino	1	3	1	0	0	5	0.2%
L. M. Bujold	0	1	0	1	3	5	0.2%
B. Chambers	0	0	0	3	1	4	0.1%
B. Sanderson	0	0	0	0	4	4	0.1%
M. Padmanabhan	0	1	1	1	1	4	0.1%
K. S. Robinson	3	0	0	1	0	4	0.1%
C. Miéville	0	0	2	2	0	4	0.1%
Harry Potter	3	0	0	0	0	3	0.1%
O. S. Card	2	0	0	0	1	3	0.1%
R. Shearman	0	1	2	0	0	3	0.1%
V. Singh	0	0	1	2	0	3	0.1%
S. Pinsker	0	0	0	1	2	3	0.1%
Other SF&F	14	70	62	76	95	317	10.8%
TOTAL	86	141	110	154	207	698	23.8%
PCT	15.6%	23.2%	16.3%	25.0%	42.8%	23.8%

2016 was the first year I read for the Hugo Awards, and you can see that that's clearly when sf&f becomes a bigger part of my reading diet. I was a bit surprised to see general sf&f also fares well in 2007-11, but now that I think about it, that makes sense—I bought a lot of stuff from used bookstores around the time I graduated college, and would have read much of it over the subsequent years. But these days it's over 40% of my reading, both Hugo books and books I've read because of them.

On the other hand, what's a bit surprising to me is to see how there are some authors I think of as favorites, and whom I am actively reading my way through... and yet I haven't read anything by them for some time! For example: Lem, Calvino, Shearman. I need to prioritize them more... but I suppose by the very nature of the idea, you can't prioritize everything!

I was not very surprised to see that Le Guin and Wells (other than Baum) topped my list. Thank grad school for Wells, and I've been fairly steady with my Le Guin.

Some other thoughts on specific authors:

• Lemony Snicket / Daniel Handler: In college, I read all the Series of Unfortunate Events books, which were big favorites in my family, but other than his (excellent) adult novel Adverbs, I haven't read anything by him since.
• M. T. Anderson is, a bit to my surprise, the only one of these authors that I read in all five four-year slices—the most consistently read. I have another five books by him on my "To be read" list, so there's a good chance this could continue to be the case.
• Stanislaw Lem: I didn't realize I hadn't read a book by him in so long—not since April 2016, and even that was just a tribute anthology with only a few stories actually by him. I have eight books by him on my "To be read" list.
• Lensmen: I have read all of this series and am unlikely to reread, to be honest, but I do have E. E. "Doc" Smith's four Skylark books, plus a concordance, on my list.
• Diane Duane: I really must finish the "Young Wizards" sequence someday, though I would probably need to reread all of the earlier books first.
• Doris Lessing is probably not best known as an sf author, but I read her five-book sf series Canopus in Argos: Archives after finishing college. I own her Children of Violence series but haven't gotten to it yet. (And I think my wife owns The Golden Notebook.)
• Philip K. Dick: The official number of six is slightly deceptive, as three of them were Library of America collections containing four or five novels—this could be sixteen if I counted those constituent novels separately, which would vault him into my top five!
• Italo Calvino is another one where I'm surprised how long it's been; I last read a book by him in August 2012! But I do have four on my list.
• Naomi Novik, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Brandon Sanderson are all authors whose series I plan on methodically working my way through series soon, so I anticipate seeing these numbers be a bit higher in another four years. Sanderson's Cosmere every nine months; I haven't firmed up my plans for Novik's Temeraire (three read, six to go) or Bujold's Vorkosigan (three read, fifteen to go) yet.

Overall, I'm pretty happy that I read more sf&f, and especially more contemporary sf&f, than I used to... but I wish I read some of my supposedly favorite authors more often! We'll see if that's rectified in the coming years as I continue to tackle my reading list.

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...