Interesting breakdown. Does it make a difference to your weighing up the gender split if you consider that your favourites / comfort reads tend to be written by women?
That was the reason why I decided to run separate stats eliminating the comfort reads in their various guises (rereads, audiobooks, mysteries & historical fiction, etc.) -- I wanted to know how the dice are bound to roll when I'm *not* falling back on favorite authors (which I've done way too much last year, even if it means that I now own almost the complete series of David Suchet & Hugh Fraser / Agatha Christie audios *rolls eyes*). Of course to get a more reliable picture I should probably repeat the exercise for 2016 and prior, too, but as an incentive to do something about my reading habits this was educational enough. I had a roughly correct idea as to the impact of my favorite reads, but there were still plenty of details I hadn't expected. All of which doesn't mean I won't go on (re-)reading (even binge-reading) Austen, Sayers, Christie, Peters / Pargeter & Co., of course -- but I'll be more aware of the impact these (re)reads have on my other reading.
Obviously, there's something specific that draws me to all of these women authors' books in the first place, and in pretty much all of their cases it's a mixture of various factors, including inter alia, writing style and authorial perspective. Which, to the extent that "authorial perspective" means "female perspective," should actually be even more reason for me to seek out more books written by women, though ...
Have you seen a change in your reading habits (m v. f) since using GR or BL or similar?
I'm pretty sure my reading of women authors increased dramatically since taking part in an online forum about books. It could just be that visibility of authors is more equalised (at least for a men/women category, rather than say other sub-grouping) than in mainstream media or in bookshops, but I have no data or sources about that.
Not necessarily a male / female change; at least, not that I'm aware. I think the thing that had the biggest impact on my reading habits was the unlimited online availability of books (with Amazon and B&N being the pioneers, at least in the U.S., where I was living when this first came about), in the late 1990s. Until that time, and before I moved to the U.S., I used to literally lug suitcases filled with books back home from England and France (and, more rarely, the U.S. or Canada), to try out new authors and read books in their original language. -- With the advent of the internet, and even if I didn't have the money to order all the books I found in Amazon's and B&N's online catalogues, merely browsing them was a complete and total eye-opener -- it was as if my reading universe had just simply burst all of its seams all of a sudden.
That said, of course discussing books with other book lovers did have a huge impact as well. For one thing, it increased the amount of books I became aware of by yet another few dimensions, but more importantly, it also acted as a channeling experience, to the extent that it made me reconsider favorites and define what exactly I liked about them, and learn how to approach that new wealth brought about by the internet -- who (authors, fellow readers, etc.) to trust and who to mistrust, what kinds of books (beyond those I already knew were working for me) might be worth giving them a try, etc. But I never looked at it from a male / female point of view -- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a high number of early / longtime female favorites had been balanced out by a number of new male favorite authors initially. If so, that would be another reason to readjust the wheel yet again, of course.
I had a bit of an ironic-type chuckle when I read the part about continuing the golden age mystery project and it (hopefully) helping increasing your female reads; I suspect that project is going to have the opposite effect on my stats. While I do have a respectable amount of G.A. female authors in my project plans, there's an awful lot of male authors too - far more than the usual amount for me re: mystery authors.
I'm curious too what effect a whole year of Flat Book Society books will have on my non-fiction stats. So far I've been giddy over all the female authors that have come up on the list and I'll be interested to see if that holds true over time.
Mine are extremely rudimentary -- anything beyond two columns to select data from and I'd be lost! I'd been thinking about this ever since we talked about the m / f author break-down of our respective reading habits, btw ... goes to show how long it takes me to actually put this sort of thing together in the first place!
Anyway, yes, I do actually think the Golden Age mystery project is going to help with the women author thing, too. I haven't tracked down (yet) in detail how many books by female writers (vs. books by male writers) are in my physical TBR because of that project alone, but I do know that I ordered a fair amount -- and of course I made a point of starting one of those this morning, before Czerski's book landed on my doorstep (Ethel Lina White, "The Lady Vanishes"). And if I should ever run out of books by female Golden Age writers that have recently been republished or regained notoriety, there's always Patricia Wentworth ... I can take only so many of her books in a row, but she's written such a lot that it's going to take me a fair time to get through her catalogue whichever way I look at it. And I'm hopeful about at least some of the Allingham books that I haven't read yet as well ...
What graphic for your pie charts did you use so that you can make and how to do you sort it out. I like to to do my 2017 wrap up and get the pie charts write so let me know how you do it and what Graphic software you use for your pie chart? If you can. Where did you get your data for the graphics? Best of luck for this year of 2018
These are very basic Excel charts. I transferred my 2017 book data (only the parts that I wanted to analyze, so no shelf info, reading dates, etc.) to an Excel sheet; then, using the "filter and sort" function, assembled the numbers for the various categories, then I opened new tabs for the various categories, added the relevant numbers there (with corresponding descriptions), highlighted the columns and lines that were to go into each graph, selected the "pie chart" symbol from the menu ... eh voilà. The rest was just basically prettifying (playing with colors, fonts, etc.). Then I copied the charts into paint.net (the free graphic editing software I use), saved them as png images, and inserted those into the post.
ok, What book site data? Was it from goodreads or booklikes? If it from Booklikes please tell me where so can find it. I know Goodreads has a stats you can download or copy.
I just copied the contents of my BL bookshelves, then deleted the columns that I didn't want.
Probably I could have used Calibre, too (it's based on an Excel-like basic program), but I'd done it via Booklikes shelves and Excel before, so this was the fastest way to go about it.
They really were -- I was tempted to go even further (e.g., I did actually tally up as well how many of my reads in the various star ratings were by male and female authors, respectively) ... but for purposes of this post, that would have been overkill.
Thank you! The breakdown itself wasn't such a lot of work, actually -- what took the longest was creating the Excel sheet with my book data that's at the basis of it all, because it required some tweaking of the data copied from my BL shelves. After that it was literally just counting books, plonking numbers into charts and playing with formatting. And I tend to discount the comfort reads / audios, which were really just in-car (and evening) entertainment and nerve tonic. 146 new books *is* a good bit more than my usual number of new reads per year, though.
7 years ago
Ha! You're funny!
It's not a lot of work other than creating the Excel sheet, tweaking data from BL shelves, counting books, plonking numbers into charts and playing with formatting. That's all! ;)
Well, the first part (creating the Excel sheet) took about a day, all told. Once I had the Excel sheet, though, each numeric analysis / breakdown took just a few minutes to put together, and ditto for the actual pie charts (because I could let Excel do most of the work for me). So the only cumbersome part was the boring copy-paste-delete-tweak operation at the very beginning ... after that, it was basically fun and games. :)
Obviously, there's something specific that draws me to all of these women authors' books in the first place, and in pretty much all of their cases it's a mixture of various factors, including inter alia, writing style and authorial perspective. Which, to the extent that "authorial perspective" means "female perspective," should actually be even more reason for me to seek out more books written by women, though ...
I'm pretty sure my reading of women authors increased dramatically since taking part in an online forum about books. It could just be that visibility of authors is more equalised (at least for a men/women category, rather than say other sub-grouping) than in mainstream media or in bookshops, but I have no data or sources about that.
That said, of course discussing books with other book lovers did have a huge impact as well. For one thing, it increased the amount of books I became aware of by yet another few dimensions, but more importantly, it also acted as a channeling experience, to the extent that it made me reconsider favorites and define what exactly I liked about them, and learn how to approach that new wealth brought about by the internet -- who (authors, fellow readers, etc.) to trust and who to mistrust, what kinds of books (beyond those I already knew were working for me) might be worth giving them a try, etc. But I never looked at it from a male / female point of view -- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a high number of early / longtime female favorites had been balanced out by a number of new male favorite authors initially. If so, that would be another reason to readjust the wheel yet again, of course.
I had a bit of an ironic-type chuckle when I read the part about continuing the golden age mystery project and it (hopefully) helping increasing your female reads; I suspect that project is going to have the opposite effect on my stats. While I do have a respectable amount of G.A. female authors in my project plans, there's an awful lot of male authors too - far more than the usual amount for me re: mystery authors.
I'm curious too what effect a whole year of Flat Book Society books will have on my non-fiction stats. So far I've been giddy over all the female authors that have come up on the list and I'll be interested to see if that holds true over time.
Anyway, yes, I do actually think the Golden Age mystery project is going to help with the women author thing, too. I haven't tracked down (yet) in detail how many books by female writers (vs. books by male writers) are in my physical TBR because of that project alone, but I do know that I ordered a fair amount -- and of course I made a point of starting one of those this morning, before Czerski's book landed on my doorstep (Ethel Lina White, "The Lady Vanishes"). And if I should ever run out of books by female Golden Age writers that have recently been republished or regained notoriety, there's always Patricia Wentworth ... I can take only so many of her books in a row, but she's written such a lot that it's going to take me a fair time to get through her catalogue whichever way I look at it. And I'm hopeful about at least some of the Allingham books that I haven't read yet as well ...
These are very basic Excel charts. I transferred my 2017 book data (only the parts that I wanted to analyze, so no shelf info, reading dates, etc.) to an Excel sheet; then, using the "filter and sort" function, assembled the numbers for the various categories, then I opened new tabs for the various categories, added the relevant numbers there (with corresponding descriptions), highlighted the columns and lines that were to go into each graph, selected the "pie chart" symbol from the menu ... eh voilà. The rest was just basically prettifying (playing with colors, fonts, etc.). Then I copied the charts into paint.net (the free graphic editing software I use), saved them as png images, and inserted those into the post.
I just copied the contents of my BL bookshelves, then deleted the columns that I didn't want.
Probably I could have used Calibre, too (it's based on an Excel-like basic program), but I'd done it via Booklikes shelves and Excel before, so this was the fastest way to go about it.
Your reading is amazing, though.
It's not a lot of work other than creating the Excel sheet, tweaking data from BL shelves, counting books, plonking numbers into charts and playing with formatting. That's all! ;)