Donna’s recent post about her year’s reading got me thinking about what I read in 2013 and what it might tell me about the year.
Like Donna I use the catalogue to record what I’ve read (and what I hope to read, but that’s another story). I managed a total of 102 books read in 2013. I also have a list of what I took home but did not read (17 on that), and books to have another go at later.
Anyway I was surprised to find I’d read 75 non-fiction books and only 20 fiction. Seven graphic novels made up the numbers.
Within the non-fiction I do count turning the pages of a fashion book in a trance-like state as reading it. If that didn’t count I’d be down to to 59 non-fiction: 9 on art, 1 on jewellery, 2 on gardening, 6 cookery books, 12 miscellaneous, and 18 on houses and decoration. Officially obsessed with the latter, in fact one of the gardening books is really about taking the stuff you can no longer fit into your house and sticking it in the garden, so it probably could count as a house book.
Eleven memoirs, 10 of them ‘misery memoirs’, or mis mems as Jennifer Saunders calls them. Her Bonkers was the only one of the 11 definitely not of the mis mem variety.
Not sure why there is so little fiction on my completed shelf (the completed shelf – such a satisfactory feeling adding a book to to it ). Even the 7 graphic novels I read this year are mostly non-fiction and cheery they are not.
So my 2013 book list is mostly a combination of visions of perfection in clothes and houses, and stories of less than perfect lives. Paging Dr. Freud.
As for doing better next year, I already have my 2014 resolution of reading 7 books off The Guardian’s list of the best of 2013 on the go. Then there is my For Later list. A goal might be not to add to it as it’s up to 354 titles now, so at current rates of reading it will take me over three years to get through it.
Sadly for me the best predictor of future reading seems to be past reading. The three books I am most looking forward to are in the genres I read most of last year:
- The bucket by Allan Ahlberg – a memoir
- Fire Island Modernist by Christopher Bascomb Rawlins – a house book
- A conspiracy of images by John J. Curley – an art book