01 January 2008

The Reading Year That Was: 2007

It’s the early hours of New Year’s Day and I had a thoroughly unexciting evening (at home, since Brisbane turned on miserable weather. I wonder if the fireworks went ahead? The ones on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts were cancelled due to wind). Plenty of time to catch up on my HUGE backlog of reviews and look back on the books of 2007....

I’ve already posted on this after a fashion, in last week’s Booking Through Thursday. 136 books total for the year (and as many reviews ... well, almost), well down on last year. As I intended. But that only touched on the best books of the year. Although I failed to keep records of grades (I kept meaning to compile a list, but I was my usual absent-minded self and kept forgetting) I can’t produce any statistics, but I strongly suspect that if plotted on a graph they wouldn’t even remotely resemble a bell curve. Lots of As, as I recall, but only a very few Ds. But then I never expected a bell curve, since I’m predisposed to like any book I open.

(Mental note to self: in 2008, keep a list of grades given. Should make next year’s retrospective much simpler.)

Seven challenges, five overlaps, thirty-four books total - exactly one-quarter of the books I read for the year. (And as for another little goal I might have mentioned somewhere ... something about new-to-me authors ... let’s just not mention that, shall we? And agree that 20 is better than none?)

And the 136 were:

General Fiction: 31
Mystery/Thriller: 21
Non-Fiction: 20
Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror: 18
Classics: 17
Historical: 8
Short Stories: 5 collections
Romance: 5
Re-reads: 9
Plays: 2 collections
Historical, Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror, Classics, General Fiction, Re-reads all upon last year, Plays holding steady and everything else well down (naturally, given that I read 43 more books last year!

5 comments:

  1. Happy New Year! I should do a round-up like this, but I'll let my own 2007 favorites remain near the top for a day or so.

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  2. Good show! Sorry about the fireworks. There were none where I'm staying, although I'm pretty sure I heard about 10 gunshots. I hid in bed.

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  3. Heh, I KNOW I couldn't finish the challenges, so I just settle for trying to make continual progress in the books I am reading. Grats on getting so much done!

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  4. Tia: Hapy New Year!

    Bookfool: Brisbane did go ahead with the fireworks, but that mae no difference to me as I was home and it's only Sydney that gets televised (they outdid themselves; the soundtrack was weirder than ever!) Thankfully we had no gunshots - except the Christmas Night drive-by, but we didn't hear that.

    Heather: Thank you! Continual progress through my soon-to-be-towering TBR pile sounds like a good goal for 2008.

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  5. That's an impressive list, especially since I didn't even make my goal of 50. I read a total of 42 books for the year and didn't finish any challenges. Oh well, I did read some really great books and look forward to more in 2008. Happy New Year!

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Header image shows detail of A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1776