I Crunch Stats!

I’ve been a bit under the weather these past couple of days so all the things I had planned for the end of year have failed to materialise. But I really must get my stats post out, given that this is the first year I have kept a reading diary and I’ve been so excited about finally having numbers to offer rather than my vague impressions. Next year I’m going to keep a reading diary again, and, in the futile hope that I might be able to control myself better, I’m keeping an acquisitions diary too.

I don’t know how many books I bought this year (and it is in any case not a figure to be put in a public realm that Mister Litlove could see) but I am pretty sure it outnumbered the books I read.  I really hate the thought of not supporting the book industry in a time when it’s in trouble. Sure, everyone will buy thrillers and romances in the supermarket, but what of those charming, quirky little books and the midlist novels and the eccentric and unusual fiction and non-fiction? If we don’t buy it, the publishers won’t publish it, and most of my buying is in slightly left of centre categories. So I worry about that. I’m permitting myself 2-4 new books a month, because let’s face it, we all know I can’t go cold turkey, and nor would I wish to. There’ll be excellent books coming out next year and I will want to own them; it’s a law of nature and not to be tangled with. But that is, ahem, less than I have been acquiring lately, and it will require some discipline. I’m doing this only because Mister Litlove despairs of the shelving problem, and because I have so many wonderful books I’d really like to read in the near future. If either of these factors should change, I’ll be back to my old, bad ways quicker than you can say ‘I still don’t want a kindle’.

So, to the stats!

This year I read 132 books. I had no idea I read so many – I thought it was around 100, and in fact this strikes me as too many. I’d like to take more time over my reading, and 2-3 books a week indicates quite a turnover.

Of these books, 75 were written by women and 57 by men. I could have predicted something like that. I always read more women authors, according to my own impressions.

Breaking down the categories I read:

55 contemporary novels

3 classics (pre-1900)

2 books of short stories

30 crime fiction novels

8 books in translation

2 books in French

32 non-fiction books

At this point I became sick to death of counting through the titles in my diary. I had thought I might count the number of turkeys and the number of really excellent books, but I couldn’t face going through the lists again. I don’t have the stamina for the maths!

Again, I would probably have guessed numbers in about the right proportions. I understand and admire people who decide they want to read more of this, that or the other, in the light of their stats. But I read books because I am, at the point I pick them up, longing to read them. I like that. It works for me. If I want to read more essays or plays or whatever in 2012, the urge will communicate itself to me in the moment, and I will happily roll with that. The only thing I’m ashamed of is that I read so few French novels. I’d like to read more French next year, and I will try to bear that in mind.

WordPress has a new thingy whereby they show you stats about your blog for the year with firework graphics, so that saved me counting up my posts. I wrote 148, apparently. Once again, I’d had the intention of counting how many of those were reviews, but couldn’t face it.

Quite a lot were reviews.

For me, this was the year of biographical writing, and I made a big effort to write more mini-biographies or to include information about authors and the conditions under which they wrote their books. I got curious about all that. I had thought I might count the number of posts that were biography based, but I didn’t.

Quite a lot of posts were based on biographical material.

Another innovation of wordpress is to confront you with a big banner every time you post that congratulates you on having reached your nth post and urges you towards your ‘next blogging goal’ which is, for example, 275 posts, if you  have written 273 or 280 posts if you have written 276. I HATE this. I’ve been blogging for over five years now and have written almost 1,000 posts; I post every other day, unless something happens, and that is how it is. I do not need to be congratulated for writing a post, nor do I need encouragement or ‘goals’. I cannot turn this stupid thing off and the patronising is doing bad things to my head.  Make it stop! Okay, rant over.

But here is a question: if next year I want to read fewer books, would it also help to write fewer posts? The sense of having a hungry blog that needs feeding does keep me trucking along. If I wrote fewer posts, could I make them of better quality? I’ve really enjoyed blogging this year and I’ve every intention of carrying on into 2012 in similar fashion. Hmmm, tricky. I suppose the answer will become apparent as the year unfolds.

But I have loved the blog this year and the wonderful book blog community that I feel so very lucky to be part of. Your comments have been utterly fantastic as ever, and I just love the conversations we have here and on other blogs. So many of my dear blogging friends are real friends now and there would be a huge hole in my life if I couldn’t hear all your news and all your thoughts on mine. May you all have a peaceful, contented, productive 2012 full of happy and engaged reading hours. And much offline fun, too. Just don’t forget to tell me all about it when you’re back online. Much love and hugs to you all and thank you for making my reading room such a special and wonderful place for me to be.

 

Mister Litlove’s Reading

As the year draws to a close, so I realise that I have not filled you in on Mister Litlove’s responses to his special selection of books. A while back you may recall, we put together a list of books for him and he’s been making his way through them ever since. One of the reasons I am reminded to do this is that, for Christmas, I gave him Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (which, bless him, my husband refers to as The Enchanted Universe) and he has been absolutely loving it. This is probably the biggest hit from the list so far. It’s a popular science book about string theory, which Mr Litlove says is explained brilliantly, in such a way that it is (relatively – heh) understandable. Brian Greene has led the reader through the theory part and is now describing his own experiences as part of a group of scientists and mathematicians working at the outer limits of our knowledge. What my husband has particularly appreciated is the voice of the narrator, which is intelligent and clear and carefully marking a trail through highly complex scientific thought for the reader to follow.

It is interesting to me that he has loved this book unreservedly, but found the narrative non-fiction works – House by Tracy Kidder and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – left him with niggling uncertainties due to the style. ‘I felt I was being sold fiction as reality,’ he said of both of them, which is testimony to the tendency, originating with Capote in America, to relate an experience in the past with all the speech left in, transforming the incoherence of ordinary people into the smooth personalities of storybook characters and suggesting that there is ultimately one way to view events. I think narrative non-fiction is really interesting, because it is basically true that what you get is most certainly not exactly what was lived, precisely because it tries very hard to present the veneer of reality. It is the non-fiction version of fiction written in the present tense, which really gets to me as it’s the only tense that a story absolutely could not take place in.

In both instances, changes are made in order to engage the reader more fully in the story, to immerse them in something that feels like it’s really happening around them. Since the 1990s there’s been a tendency in cultural artefacts – movies, books, art – to give the spectator/reader an experience to take away with them. Previously, art (mostly) offered itself to a spectator/reader acting as a witness, who could sit at a little distance from the events, watching them go past, and reflecting on them. There is no value difference to extricate here, the approaches are just different: one more cerebral, one more sensational. For my own part, I can’t abide being forced into an experience I may not have chosen, and much prefer art that allows me to be a witness. But that’s just me. I do think, though, that it’s an intriguing litmus test to take, to figure out how much like reality you want your fantasies to be, how much you like art to show or hide its mechanisms of construction, how much you want to be carried away to an elsewhere, even one inside of yourself.

But I digress. The novels Mr Litlove has read so far are Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler and I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. He enjoyed both very much. Charlotte Simmons is about a reserved, hard-working young woman who arrives at university to find it a hotbed of sex and sport and scandal, and the painful process she undergoes in order to fit in. Saint Maybe is a family story, which begins with a tragedy: Ian inadvertently causes the death of his brother in a car crash, leaving three small children pretty much orphaned. Feeling responsible, he puts his life on hold to bring them up. ‘In a way,’ said Mister Litlove, ‘they are both about the difference between the way we think life ought to be and the way it really is.’ I thought this was an astute comment, although it takes us back full circle to narrative non-fiction, and the difference between the reality we live (confusing, bewildering and when seen through the perspective of string theory, truly bizarre) and the reality that certain kinds of art embody, all smoothed out with fantasies of comprehensibility and order and value.

We move forward through life with idealism and fantasy guiding our choices, we live in brute instinct and perplexity, and we look back with hindsight that allows us to extract meaning – meaning I should point out, that often changes the further in time we move away from the events themselves. These dynamics, forwards into the unknown, and backwards over reality, are so often at complete odds with one another, it’s not surprising that so much of art is about negotiating the disjunction. Perhaps that’s why The Elegant Universe is so satisfying to Mister Litlove; it brings together all the madness of temporality in a hugely sophisticated theory that proves we still don’t understand the half of life on this planet.