I was planning to write up a review today, but life got busy and reddit got … interesting, taking up all my evening. Still, I did this little bit of math for this thread by Krista D Ball, referincing that tweet with the advice for authors to read ONE book published in the last year.
I love stats, and there’s not nearly enough of them on the blog, so thought I would share.
(for some reason goodreads is only showing me year read for half my books, so this data is not strictly accurate, but I think the averages and proportions are representative)
Year |
No of books |
last 5 years |
current year |
average book age |
| 2011 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 7.25 |
| 2012 | 20 | 10 | 1 | 4.9 |
| 2013 | 35 | 10 | 3 | 11.3 |
| 2014 | 86 | 30 | 3 | 7.3 |
| 2015 | 40 | 19 | 12 | 4.7 |
| 2016 | 29 | 17 | 3 | 3.9 |
| 2017 | 15 | 8 | 1 | 5.8 |
| 2018 | 17 | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| 2019 | 65 | 41 | 16 | 3 |
| 2020 | 14 | 12 | 0 | 3.6 |
Over the last 5 years, I’ve read 35 (19%) books in the year they were published, and 94 (52%) books within 5 years of when they were published.
As I was expecting the average year difference between date read and date pub got significantly smaller after I joined reddit (4) than before (6.4). But even the 6.4 isn’t really bad, least modern year still had me reading 30% within 5 years of published date.
I’m really curious, how recent is your reading?
I suspect bloggers will skew very recent, in fact, I know I have to make an effort to read backlist books I’ve been meaning to.