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A Crow Short of The Murder
Nov. 23rd, 2011 09:40 pmSometime in 1992 (June 18th, to be precise), I decided that I wanted to keep track of what I read. Actually, I'd had the idea a few times in the past, but I'd bogged down in the format to store it in or something. But in 1992, I had this program called Framework II on my second-hand XT 8088 computer, which had a spreadsheet/database mode, and it seemed like the way to do it. I've kept it up since then, in different formats--after I couldn't run FW2 anymore, I just used a text file, until I put it into Microsoft Access, where it still resides. This list is almost completely dedicated to fiction; for some reason, though I've thought of it many times over the years, I have never gotten around to doing an equivalent list for nonfiction reads, even though I spend close to half my time reading non-fiction these days.
( So here's the list of what I read in 1992, for anyone who's interested... )
So, despite starting my tally almost halfway through the year, I still got 71 books read in that time, which meant I probably read at least 120 books overall, ten books a month, or so. I don't think I was reading nearly as many nonfiction back then, but there might have been a few. Anyway, let's sum up:
71 books: of those, 22 were from the library, 4 were actually magazines, 3 were my wife's manuscripts, and 6 were rereads, so that's 64 "real" books, and 36 of those, just over half were books that I owned and had not read before--books that "counted" against my quantity of "unread books", which was the count of books that I owned and had not read yet.
Of the non-magazine books, they are surprisingly evenly divided between Fantasy (24), Science Fiction (23) and Mainstream (18). I guess the Mainstream number is the most surprising, because I think of myself as a genre reader. A lot of the calls are kind of hard to make, though--Witch World is set in a fantasy-that-later-turns-into-SF, the Marquez book is sort of "magic realism" but I counted it as Mainstream, and yet Not Wanted On The Voyage I counted as Fantasy. I'm inclined to say that it averages out.
Also, including the magazines, there were 13 anthologies or collections, leaving 58 novels. 24 of those novels were in series--or thereabouts, since it's not always clear when a novel is part of a series. (For instance, Journey To Aprilioth may be in the same world as Songs From The Drowned Lands, but they're not closely related...)
I don't think there was any other I read more than two books by (unless you count the three of my wife's manuscripts)--those authors are Lin Carter, Andre Norton, K.W. Jeter, M.J. Engh, and Robert A. Heinlein. I do usually like to space out reading an author's books, unless I'm doing a series reread, and even then...
That's probably enough dissection. At some point I may get around to doing 1993, or the first half of 1993. Who knows, someday I may even catch up...
( So here's the list of what I read in 1992, for anyone who's interested... )
So, despite starting my tally almost halfway through the year, I still got 71 books read in that time, which meant I probably read at least 120 books overall, ten books a month, or so. I don't think I was reading nearly as many nonfiction back then, but there might have been a few. Anyway, let's sum up:
71 books: of those, 22 were from the library, 4 were actually magazines, 3 were my wife's manuscripts, and 6 were rereads, so that's 64 "real" books, and 36 of those, just over half were books that I owned and had not read before--books that "counted" against my quantity of "unread books", which was the count of books that I owned and had not read yet.
Of the non-magazine books, they are surprisingly evenly divided between Fantasy (24), Science Fiction (23) and Mainstream (18). I guess the Mainstream number is the most surprising, because I think of myself as a genre reader. A lot of the calls are kind of hard to make, though--Witch World is set in a fantasy-that-later-turns-into-SF, the Marquez book is sort of "magic realism" but I counted it as Mainstream, and yet Not Wanted On The Voyage I counted as Fantasy. I'm inclined to say that it averages out.
Also, including the magazines, there were 13 anthologies or collections, leaving 58 novels. 24 of those novels were in series--or thereabouts, since it's not always clear when a novel is part of a series. (For instance, Journey To Aprilioth may be in the same world as Songs From The Drowned Lands, but they're not closely related...)
I don't think there was any other I read more than two books by (unless you count the three of my wife's manuscripts)--those authors are Lin Carter, Andre Norton, K.W. Jeter, M.J. Engh, and Robert A. Heinlein. I do usually like to space out reading an author's books, unless I'm doing a series reread, and even then...
That's probably enough dissection. At some point I may get around to doing 1993, or the first half of 1993. Who knows, someday I may even catch up...
