My year in books, 2012 edition

I started writing this post on New Year's Eve Eve, and then almost immediately realized that all I wanted to do with the end of my 2012 was sit like a lump on a log and coast into 2013. So that is almost exactly what I did, breaking of course for some New Year's Eve socializing and some New Year's Day shopping at Ikea (how did I spend 2 whole hours there, and why oh why did I buy those things I now need to return this weekend?!)...and now it's suddenly the third day of 2013 and I guess I need to start engaging in the world again. So hey, why not finish my year-end wrap up of the books I read in 2012?

---

I usually like to do some kind of summation here at year's end, but I didn't really blog enough to summarize the year in posts (no posts in May, June OR July? I am a terrible blogger), and I don't have the energy at the moment to do the same thing I did last year. So why not focus on something easy and awesome, like my year in BOOKS? After all, 2012 was a banner year in books for your favorite doomsday blogger.

In 2012 I consumed (i.e. read or listened to) a record-breaking 51 books, and at year end I was more than halfway through two more.* Last year (2011) I only consumed 44 books, and the year before (2010), 46. The year before THAT (2009), if my accounting is accurate that far in the past, I consumed a measly 31. So yeah, I made myself 51 books smarter in 2012, and I'm rather proud of that. I'm less proud that I didn't manage to finish the last two stragglers, but I guess they give me a jump on 2013.**

Okay. Without further ado, I present to you my year in books.

The highlights

• 78% of the books I consumed were fiction.

• Only 18% of the books I consumed this year were real paper books.

• I read 10,177 pages, 75% of which were in fiction books.

***Chart shows page counts for Kindle and real books only.
Page counts are based on the print copy (paperback if available
at time of calculation, hardcover if not).

• I spent almost 12 full days listening to audio books. 84% of that time was spent listening to fiction audio books.

Total: 280 hours, or 11.7 days. Most of that time was
either spent driving or cooking. Not a bad use of my time!

More fun facts, but fewer graphs 

• Number of dystopian novels consumed: 10 (plus one in the works, and I'm not sure whether to count 11/22/63 or not, so I didn't). 
• Best dystopian novel consumed: Brave New World, followed by Wool and The Road (tie).
• Longest book consumed (in pages): 11/22/63, by Steven King. 880 pages (or 30 hours and 44 minutes of listening time, making it also the longest book consumed in minutes).
• Number of books consumed that exceeded 500 pages: 7. Number of books consumed that were between 400 and 500 pages: 12. Histogram of book length (in pages): provided below.

Figure includes Kindle, real, and audio books. Page counts
are based on the print copy (paperback if available at time
of calculation, hardcover if not).

• Book that took the longest to read (in days): Ireland, by Frank Delaney: 168 days. 
• Book I liked the least: Ireland, by Frank Delaney.
• Book that took the second-longest to read (in days): Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, by Gary Taubes. 127 days.
• Book I liked the second-least: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.
  
• Average number of days it took to consume each book: 20. Median number of days: 11.
• On a scale of one to five stars, average rating given to books consumed: 3.19 stars. Median rating: 3 stars.
• Correlation between time spent consuming the book (in days) and stars given: -.36.
  
• Most favorite book of the year: hands down, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing.
• Fun Fact: Shackleton's right-hand man, Tom Creen, was Irish, and when he got home after the above-mentioned (and aptly named) Incredible Voyage he opened up this pub, which I almost went to when I was in Ireland, except I didn't, because it was closed. Alas.
• Five best fiction books consumed in 2012: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; Among the Missing, by Dan Chaon; Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen; Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan; and Museum of the Weird, by Amelia Grey.

Want to know more about my reading? Boy howdy, are you in luck! A Google spreadsheet I nerdily made of my 2012 reading can be found here, and of course, you can always keep up to date with my reading on Goodreads.

Happy(?) 2013!

--------
*One of which is the eternally long and never-ending The Idiot, which if you'll remember I enthusiastically blogged about in October. Since then, I have grown less and less enamored with the novel, and now I'm just ready for it to be over already, except it's not over, because I can never bring myself to read very much of it at a time. Sometimes I go so long in between stints of reading it that I completely forget who some of the characters are, and what their motivations in the drama might be, and I am therefore quite lost. I had to read the entire second section twice because I retained nothing from it, and if I were to do the book justice I'd need to re-read the third as well, but I'm only 100 pages away from the end at this point and I'm going to keep plowing along. When I'm done I'll probably read the Wikipedia plot summary to grasp the finer points of the plot that are currently eluding me.
**My policy on counting books is that I count them in the year and month in which I finish them.