Hello Readers!

Our What's Next tab is updated with the list of candidates to consider for future club selections.

Here's some observations on our selection history:

How many books have we selected?

We have selected a total of 79 books, over a 7 1/2 year history.  2021 is a partial year, but I'm counting up through The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, scheduled for discussion in October 2021

How many pages?

From club inception to August 2021 (Through Klara, our last meeting) we have read 28,616 pages in the club.   

Our shortest book so far was A Christmas Carol (88 pages), followed by The Life and Adventures of Santa Clause (90 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).  (Discounting Gravity's Rainbow at 770 pages...)

Our average selection has 372 pages, down a mere 3 pages from when I ran these stats back in 2018.

Is what we are reading well-rated on Amazon?

At some point 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 (very slowly) overall, and we seem to not be interested in books without at least 4-ish Amazon Stars.  Note how in the last 2 years our variation in amazon stars has really decreased.  Some of that is the range restriction in 2020 from COVID19, we don't have many selections in that year, so that's part of it.  Not sure if that's a general trend at Amazon, or a reflection that we may be less tolerant of lower-rated books now.  The lowest rated book we have selected is now Amsterdam at 3.8 stars followed by The White Plague at 3.9 stars.  Note when we read Gone Girl, it came in at 3.8 but is now showing 4.0 on Amazon. Wicked, which used to be our lowest at 3.6 is now showing 4.4 stars on Amazon.  The highest rated book at 5 stars remains Have a Good Day for Jesus and John Wayne, followed by Illumination in the Flatwoods at 4.9 stars. 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 all that well in that respect.  we are ethno- and cultural- centric in our club reading selections.  American, British and Canadian authors represent 85% of our reading selections.

 

What's our ratio of Fiction to Non-Fiction?

What categories (Fiction vs Non-Fiction) have we selected?  (I classified our one poetry selection as non-fiction as it appeared memoir-ish)

and what genres have we been reading?

Our Fiction genre data isn't very useful as the vast majority are unclassified.  Might be something we talk about at a future club meeting?  I'm not sure where to categorize much of these, so I've just left them blank.

Our Non-Fiction genre data is affected by some inconsistencies in categorization I know, especially since I put such things as River of Doubt in Journalism.  That should probably have been one of the Narrative Non-Fiction, perhaps other things I put in Journalism should be reclassified as well.

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.  I'll post the data once I remember how to do so! But hopefully tonight or tomorrow.