Hello Readers!

I did a little more data scraping from the intarwebs, gathering some demographic information for the list of authors we've considered for the book club.

This analysis includes all books through the October 2021 selection (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry).

Books by Birth Year of Author

In addition to reading the world (see the previous post), I was wanting to encourage reading classics.  Our earliest born author is Alexander Pushkin in 1799 (The Captain's Daughter), our latest born author is Sara Baume in 1984 (Spill Simmer Falter Wither).  

I've binned the authors up by quintile of books we've selected, so this bargraph is a little bit odd since the selection is forced, but you can at least see counts of books selected by birth year band:

The unknown bin is all authors for whom I could not find a year of birth, but most of them are current working authors. 

• bin 1799 thru 1907 covers 108 years (pre WWI?)
• bin 1908 thru 1947 covers 40 years (between the WWs?)
• bin 1948 thru 1962 covers 15 years (the boomers approximately?)
• bin 1962 thru 1975 covers 14 years (GenX, aka latchkey or MTV generation)
• bin 1975 thru 1984 covers 10 years (Millenials? a little early for that but maybe)

When we examine the page count of books, by the birth year of the author, we see a general trend of larger books selected as the author birth year comes closer to the current year.  It may mean we are more willing to tackle larger books if the author is near us in age generationally.

Books by Gender of Author

35% of our selected works have been by female authors, and 65% by male authors. I note a pretty big shift from before 2017 to after 2017, where prior to 2017 we were more likely to select books by male authors, than we have been since 2017.

Looking at the gender of authors we have selected based on birth year, we see a pretty strong trend that when the author we select is younger, the gender tends to be female.  That may be a reflection of trends in publishing?  not sure about that.

Looking at the size of books we select by gender, not a whole lot of difference overall, but that pre- to post- 2017 stands out pretty strongly.  the average page count of a book we selected where the author was female is 358 pages, when the author is male the average book length is 380 page (this male page average includes Gravity's Rainbow).  As above, I note before 2017 our male authored books ran somewhat longer than our female authored books which is affecting the mean of course.

The trend lines in the graph below show that since 2017, we've been much more evenly split in total page count read in the year by author gender than previously.  during 2021 to date, I note we seem to be selecting male authors more than female authors so far.