# Reading Stats [[reading-list|What I have read since 1996]] | [[frequent-list|Frequent books and authors]] | [[About the List]] ## Reading by year The chart below illustrates the number of books I read each year since 1996 broken down by fiction and nonfiction. The dashed line represents my original goal of 52 books per year. ![[booksByYear.png]] Looking strictly at books per year can be a little deceiving, however, because books vary by length. Another way of looking at this data is by pages per years. Here is a similar chart broken down by page count (fiction and nonfiction). ![[pagesPerYear.png]] Looking for a way to normalize the data, I came up with a measurement I call "BEq" or "Book Equivalent." 1 BEq = 410 pages, which is the average length of the books I've read over the last quarter century. Because BEq takes page length into account, I can produce a chart that compares actual book read to book equivalents: ![[booksBeqByYear.png]] Things remain fairly close. In years where the BEq (orange) line falls below the Book (blue) line, it means the books I read that year tended to be longer. Where BEq is above the Book line, the books I read, on average, tended to be shorter. ## Reading by subject and author I read books on a wide variety of subjects. A good way to visualize this is through a word cloud, where the subjects are represented by the frequency of their appearance based on the size of the words that appear in the cloud. The bigger the word, the more frequently I read that subject. Here is a word cloud based on the subjects that I list for each of the books on my reading list: ![[allSubjectsWordCloud.png]] When I started tracking my reading, I read more fiction than nonfiction. Around 2014, that began to change. Here is a look at the variety of nonfiction that I've read over the years. ![[nonfictionWordCloud.png]] We can do something similar with the authors that I read: ![[authorWordCloud.png]] Clearly, Stephen King and Isaac Asimov are among favorites of mine, but if we eliminate those names from the list and look at who remains, we can see some other favorites that might not be as obvious at first glance: ![[filteredAuthorWordCloud.png]] Indeed, Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire books, has become a favorite of mine over the last few years.