Summing up 2013

Wow! 2013 is over. I've already finished one book in 2014 and started my documentation for another year of reading. Some people use a speadsheet, but I simply keep a text file with information (more properly “data”) on what I've read. From this data, I can produce statistics. The easy stats are that I read 149 books and 50,226 pages in 2013. When I set an overall reading goal each year, it includes both number of books to read and number of pages. I consider myself to have met my goal if either one of these is reached. So for 2013, I reached my goal on pages, but not on number of books. (Well...Goodreads called it 150 books since there were 2 novellas which were listed as separate books in its database, but I considered them a single “book”. That's how I managed to meet my 2013 Goodreads Challenge and still document only 149 books in 2013. It's slippery, but I'll take it.)

More detailed stats: The most books I read in any one month was 19 in October, and the fewest was in November with only 8. Those two months also take the prizes for highest and lowest number of pages with 6038 and 2827 respectively. The average number of books per month was 12, and I read exactly that many in January and September. The average number of pages per month was 4185.

I keep information on format (paper, electronic, audio) as well as genre, and here's how 2013 came out in those categories:
Format

• Paper: 89
• Electronic: 49
• Audio: 11

Genre

• Mystery: 71
• Paranormal & Urban Ficton: 29
• Science Fiction: 23
• Fantasy: 13
• Mainstream: 12

I also document the source of the books that I read. This year, for the first time, I've made a concerted effort to obtain books from the library. I borrowed 41 books from the library. That's almost ½ of the paper books which I read in 2013. Of the electronic books, twelve of them were free, sixteen were gifts, five were borrowed from the Kindle Lending Library, and four of them cost only $0.99.

I didn't blog much in 2013. I used as an excuse that the server hosting my reading blog was offline. But even after deciding to post some reading information on my LiveJournal blog, I didn't keep it up. (I've been a bad, bad blogger.)