Ten years are a lot.

In January 2008 I had just turned 23. I just graduated in Math, and I had decided to completely change my field of study, embracing the world of digital libraries. I was about to leave for a master’s course that was held in Oslo, Tallinn and Parma, and I would start working a few years later. In these ten years I changed many things: I called “home” many places, moved many times: I broke up with my then fianceè, I started another beautiful relationship, I bought a house. I lost my faith, I became vegetarian (the two things are not related, maybe). Among other things, I have read a lot of books, and I have tracked them all on aNobii (it’s the original Goodreads).

My personal and professional life revolves around books, and I can’t think of myself without automatically thinking about the books that I read. It’s simply a matter of identity. Books are bricks: a literal and literary construction of the self, through the words of others.

I very much like the idea of ​​tracking my discrete building of myself. It amuses me and I have greater patience and skill than your average reader in data curation and visualization with RAW.

So ten years ago I registered in Anobii, and since then I have always tracked all the books I read. And here, I’m analyzing them.

Methodology

It works like this: the following charts are about the last ten years, meaning the books I read from January 2008 to December 2017. For these books, I have the end-of-reading date (if I finished them) or some chronological data.

I decided to put both the finished books and even those I did not finish: those that I left, those that I lost on the train, those that I consulted, those that “yes, I’ll finish you one day”, those I-would-but-I-will-not-touch-anymore (I always try to read cover to cover). The complete/incomplete binary division simplifies things, just like fiction/nonfiction (the latter assumes a long separate explanation, which I’ll save for a later post): fiction is novels and short stories, nonfiction is everything else. Poetry there is not.

When I speak of read books, therefore, I mean all those I had in my hands and somehow I read; when I specify finished I mean really finished.

The data is clean enough, but I do not exclude that there will be errors here and there, and in ten years I have not always been perfect in recording everything.

Here we go.