Here's some observations on our selection history:
How many books have we selected?
We have selected a total of 51 books, over a 5 year history. 2018 is a partial year, but I'm counting up through River of Doubt, scheduled for discussion in September
How many pages?
From club inception to mid-2017 we read 12,375 pages. I'm still working data entry for the later selections and will update as I get information entered.
Our shortest book so far was A Christmas Carol (88 pages), followed by My Antonia (118 pages). Our longest works selected were Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (689 pages) much of which was not text, followed by Once and Future King (650 pages).
I'm still data entering page counts from about mid-2017 on, prior to that I have already entered. I'll update the charts as I finish collecting the data but here's what I see right now: Our average selection has 375 pages, and we are drifting toward our average: our bigger books are less big, our smaller books are less small. Our average may be increasing slightly, its hard to tell whether the change in average is a trend or an anomaly in 2017.
At some points when I was putting things on the list to consider, Amazon Stars was one of the things I paid attention to. Here's how our selections have stacked up on Amazon:
Our average Amazon Stars is increasing overall, and we seem to not be interested in books without at least 4-ish Amazon Stars. Again, I haven't yet fetched the data for 2018, but I'll update when I have it. The lowest rated book we have selected was Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, at 3.6 stars. The highest rated book at 5 stars was Have a Good Day for Jesus and John Wayne. In general I'm not sure Amazon Stars really matters, but this is what we have for data.
Who wrote what we are reading?
One of the things I was trying to do early on is "read the world", trying to get voices and contexts we might not pick up through our individual reading preferences. We have not done well in that respect. we are ethno- and cultural- centric in our club reading selections. I still need to gather the data for 2018 but I seriously doubt it will change from what I see here.
What's our ratio of Fiction to Non-Fiction?
and what genres have we been reading?
We have been moving steadily away from Fable, Fantasy, and Historical fiction, and steadily toward Realistic Fiction, and moving heavily toward Non-Fiction in the last few years, from where we started.
Now you know!
We can use this information to insure we are reading broadly, and not focusing exclusively on a small subset of genres.
Looking forward to everyone's feedback. Here's the data that produced these charts. Happy to discuss whether the genres make sense or not.
