I track a lot of information about the books I read, partly for the fun of making overly-complicated graphs about it later. 2019 was my fourth year of extra-thorough reading reviews, and the second year in a row where my reading was no longer dominated by texts assigned for graduate school. In 2018 I followed a themed ‘reading challenge’ to push myself to still read widely, but 2019 I went truly solo: so what did I read? (And what do I actually recommend you read?)
For 2018, I collected data on a few new aspects of my reading. I’ll look at those first, and then dig in to the comparisons to 2017 and 2016. The full list of everything I read is, as always, on Goodreads.
I track all of the books I read over at Goodreads, which gives me some great base data to examine my reading each year. They make a fun “year in books” page to kick things off with:
I love indexes. They’re like spreadsheets in disguise, (and as previously established, I love spreadsheets). So when I was reading Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771) for my special fields exam, and I noticed that the Victorian edition digitized for Project Gutenberg included an “index to tears” for the novel… well, I got a little carried away.
Continue reading “Vintage “small data”: playing with an Index to Tears”
In my ongoing quest to make as many spreadsheets and graphs as possible, I pulled my reading history from Goodreads for 2016. Last year saw me through my last semester of coursework, and the entirety of my comprehensive exams, both of which I expected to have a pretty substantial influence on my reading habits. I’ll be curious to compare the stats to other years some time, but for now, let’s dig in to the 60 books I read last year!
Lawrence Evalyn 