Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A Year of LibraryThing

A year ago, I started keeping track of my reading via LibraryThing. Now it's time to see what I read:

By the Numbers
513 books in all (however, this isn't an accurate count because I didn't start recording picture books until September). That's about 1.4 books a day.

257 teen books

182 tween books

182 children's books

54 preschool books (since September)

It doesn't add up quite right because some books I put in multiple categories. Very few books were only tween, for example. But you have to admit, that's a heck of a list. Even I didn't know I read that much.

Read-iest month:
September 2007 (84)
Adjusted for inclusion of picture books
November 2007 (45)

Top five tags:
friendship (113)
love (80)
funny (75)
historical (71)
danger (40)

Most surprising tag:
Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. (Oh, come on. You totally would have made that joke too.)

Interesting. I always knew that I loved YA books the most, but I expected tween and children's books to be much further behind than they were. I also always knew I liked that mushy stuff, but the importance of friendship in the books I read was another surprise.

I even find that I remember books better if I've entered them into LT, as if stopping and thinking through the strongest themes or conflicts has impressed them deeper into my brain somehow. Of course, the very best need no LT reminder, but it's good to have a record of the mid-list, so to speak.

Now I'm just waiting for them to put Boolean operation in the tag search field, so I can figure out how many funny books I read in December, for example. Oh my god, I'm such a library geek.

This was kind of neat. I'm going to try and do one of these at the end of each month, just to see what I read.

How do you keep tabs on your reading? Do you?

1 comment:

rgnelson said...

I've been keeping track on Bookpedia as a not for public consumption list. If I am going to publicly admit to reading something, I've been doing that on Goodreads.com. I have no idea what I've been reading, but I'm sure the software on Bookpedia can tell me. In truth, I'm a little afraid of knowing. It might actually mean something then. Now, I can just say a lot of this and that without feeling at all worried about the implications of my choices.