3. The Quantified 2014

One of the most interesting things for me to track each year has been how my reading progresses over the calendar year. It’s never a linear progression — 2012 was probably the closest I’ve come to that, but I’m happy that I’m finally returning to the pace that I had in 2011, the first year I started to track my reading.

3.1 A Return to Form

Patterns: 1) The end of the year is always a rush to the finish, the holiday season coupled with end of the year lists means lots of added pages. 2) Fallow periods are followed by periods of intense reading. 3) Reading appears to be inversely correlated with the amount of experimental lab work I do. Times when I’m writing papers or grants are typically incredibly full of books — my most fallow periods have come when I’m pushing strongly to gather data for a paper.

3.2 A Year of Recency

Something I started doing this year was keeping track of the publication date of the books I read. A few patterns jump out — I read a lot of new releases this year, particularly towards the end of the year during awards season. The other fascinating thing about this approach is that it allows for very direct visualization of when I read series — the two rising arcs in March and May were the two major series I read in the year (The Dresden Files, and as much of the Honor Harrington books as I could stomach).

3.3 The 400 Page Book

Interestingly, over the past few years, it seems that I’ve moved from reading books that bimodally distributed in length, to reading books that are very neatly clustered around 400 pages long (with this trend being particularly marked this year). Part of this is probably due to the glut of long fantasy books I read in 2011, but I think there’s also something here about what the ‘correct’ length is for a popularly viable novel, which may be getting more and more constrained with time.

3.4 The Kindle Dominates All

The real story of my personal reading over the past few years has been the rapid, inexorable rise of the Kindle. In my first two years as a PhD student at Stanford, a steady stream of Hardcovers from the library here complemented my Kindle books, but in the past two years, the Kindle monopoly has grown to be almost complete.