Analysing my reading habits since 1993
It does say data wonk in my profile
I have no idea why I have kept a list of all the books I’ve read since 1993. I don’t know anyone else in my family who does. My dad keeps a list of the books in a series he’s reading or would like to read, and crosses them off as he goes — it used to live in his wallet, for reference in charity shops. When I was a child I seem to remember he had a similar list for me, so that when he was browsing Roblyn’s second hand bookshop on his lunch break, he wouldn’t accidentally buy a duplicate. But ask him if he’s ever read that history book on his shelf, or when he last read a Robert Rankin, and he’s unlikely to be able to tell you.
Some time in 1993 I picked up a small yellow notebook and wrote a list in red biro of all the books I’d read so far that year, aided by my diary where I’ll have noted starting and finishing each one. I can no longer remember why. Ever since then, every time I’ve finished reading a book I’ve added the title and author in the smallest legible writing I can manage. If I’m more than halfway through a book at New Year, I hold off writing the next year as a heading until I’ve worked my way through it. Then I count up the year’s total and write it next to or beneath the final book of the year, with a circle round it.
I’ve seen other people recommend keeping a reading journal, where you not only write down all the books you read but you write about whether you enjoyed them and why. My bare list is not one of those. Although I’ve written reviews of many books in the last 16 years on my own blog or other people’s websites, and I might have written the odd line about them in my diary, I have never felt the need to write a private response to a book at any length. Or to give them a star rating.
I don’t list the books I didn’t get to the end of, not even crossed out or with a note like (50% only). I don’t list audiobooks, even if I was listening intently throughout and didn’t get distracted by the cats or fail to rewind when a noisy lorry drove past. I don’t — and this will account for the dipping of the total in recent years, to some extent — count anything that isn’t a book and isn’t completely read cover to cover. There is no record of the thousands of words I’ve read on other people's Substacks for instance, the online short story magazines, or the reference books I skipped a chapter of.
My day-job has the word ‘analyst’ in it. I spend a lot of my time working with data, looking for patterns. I’m only surprised it’s taken me this long to transfer the list from a pocket notebook to a spreadsheet so I could have a proper look1. In all honesty it’s probably sprung from there only being a couple of pages of the notebook left2. In the same way that my monthly To Do list migrated from an almost-full notebook to my phone a couple of years ago, I probably had an idea that I could go electronic for this one too. I transcribed the titles and authors of all 1,288 books at the end of last year, alongside the year I read it (and which number book it was, for that year) and I even added a year of publication for some of them. Mainly because I’d kept the data that was behind that graph I mentioned in the footnote.
There were some books that rang no bells whatsoever. Without looking them up online (which I’ve resisted), I couldn’t even say whether they were a novel, non-fiction, a poetry collection or what. Others, I could remember the cover but not the contents, or I remembered getting it out of the library or finding it in a charity shop or receiving it as a gift. Some gave me a picture in my mind of the lead character, as I’d imagined them at the time of reading. Others, a vivid scene of being sprawled on my bed with a paperback on a rainy afternoon during the school holidays.
The thing about having this whole list available to search and compare, I can’t pretend to any level of sophistication or taste. Yes, I know reading isn’t a competition and yes, I know I complain about pretentious types that read the Booker Prize lists not because they’re interested but to be able to tell people they have, but there are limits. If it wasn’t in black and white I doubt I’d believe that I read Mr Bean’s Diary3.
There’s a whole bunch of authors I was clearly way more into than I’d like to think. I remember my dad lending me a Robert Crais novel and then reading a couple of others before I quickly grew tired of the extra-judicial justice (Joe Pike shooting the villains every damned time) and the similarity of his plots4. The spreadsheet reveals that I read a full dozen of his books between 2009 and 2012 — so clearly I didn’t tire that quickly (and yet I’ve read only 3 Inspector Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri; I would have said it was at least twice that many). It also tells me I read 7 Ben Elton novels between 1994 and 2003, though I can remember only 3 of them, maybe 4.
Terry Pratchett is my most-read author by some way, though the spreadsheet has Stephen King slightly out in front. However, since I read the Discworld novels in order and I began 1993 with Moving Pictures5, I know I’ve read several more than the spreadsheet holds, whereas I first read Stephen King in 1994 (and last read him in 2015). Anthony Trollope may overtake Pratchett someday, as I’ve still got a few Trollope novels to go at and I haven’t re-read a Pratchett since 2021. The only other author who comes close to these three is Robert Rankin, who I haven’t read since 2017: at one time, I pounced on each Pratchett, Rankin and King novel as they came out in paperback, but as I’ve written about elsewhere, the feeling of too many authors, too little time, caused me to ditch long series and broaden my horizons.
Possibly the most telling omission from the list are my GCSE English set texts. There is no Lord of the Flies, no Romeo and Juliet (this isn’t because of some arbitrary rule on scripts, because the Yes Minister scripts are on there). There is, strangely, Far From the Madding Crowd, the Thomas Hardy novel that put me off Literature with a capital L — I would swear I hadn’t got to the end of that, the same way I never got to the end of Jane Eyre or anything else we ever had to read for school. However, I believe my list and if it’s there, then I must somehow have ploughed on and not simply relied on Friend T to summarise the chapters our homework questions were on, like I usually did. I can’t remember what happened though.
It’s been fun looking through like this and I may well keep adding to the spreadsheet but I’m not sure I’ll ever abandon keeping a paper list. There’s something about those lines of cramped writing in red, green, purple, blue, black that take me back more reliably than a uniform row in a spreadsheet.
I would love to know if anyone else keeps a similar list — let me know in the comments or by replying to the email.
About ten years ago I did make a graph of my reading for the year, to show which decades the books were originally published in. I think that led to a year of trying to only read 20th and 21st century books, but I missed Anthony Trollope too much to keep it going longer-term.
With the size of my writing and the number of books I read these days, that’s probably still a couple of years’ use.
It was just before I turned 15, I found it in the school library while I was supposed to be doing my homework, and I thought it was very funny. Although obviously I didn’t write any of that down in my notebook.
With a private detective series there’s only so much leeway you’ve got, so maybe this is an unfair criticism. If I’d enjoyed them more, I would have looked forward to the similarity I guess.
Borrowed from Big Brother and read all in one day, presumably at the end of the school Christmas holidays, unless I was off school ill in early January.
I have been keeping a list, just as yours, with the title, author and when I read it, since 2008 and Have old recently started making a few notes about what I thought about it. I love looking back on what I read when!