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2015 In Review: Books!
I've decided the new year doesn't start until my sister goes back to Illinois, so we're doing more end-of-year posts before I'm back to business as usual. :p Y'all ready for statistics?
I managed my Goodreads reading challenge, which was for 250 books, but only by reading two little Running Press Miniatures in between turns while board gaming on New Year's Eve. Still, pretty good.
Not quite as impressive as it seems, because of those 250 books:
60 were comic trades or graphic novels (of those, 22 Marvel, 1 DC, and 10 free review copies of non-superhero stuff, 27 assorted others)
24 were elementary-grade chapter books (9 by Ursula Vernon, 7 canon review for exchanges)
54 were picture books (14 kids' storybooks, 14 kids' nonfiction, and 26 adults' picture books - mostly art books or coffeetable books with lots of pictures)
5 were novella or monograph length
There were also three books of beginner piano music I played through.
That leaves 104 of what most people think of when they think "book". That 105 included:
27 novels, of which 10 were either 2015 Hugo nominees or 2016 Hugo possibles;
77 nonfiction books, of which 17 were about silly paranormal topics like UFOs and telepathic begonias.
My main goal in reading this year was to finish the ridiculous number of books that I had started, got distracted from, and set down, in previous years. These weren't bad books, if they were bad I would have gotten rid of them when I stopped, they were just, usually, slow going and took a fair amount of brain, so I'd pick up something easier or something more relevant to what I was currently trying to write before I finished them, and, anyway,the list was getting scary. Related to that, I had a bunch of books I'd gotten through free-if-you-review programs that I then hadn't read and hadn't reviewed.
Between those two the load of guilt was enough that it was interfering with reading being fun. :/
Partway through the year I also bought a Hugo Awards vote, so my secondary goal (which had been just 'read more novels and recent fiction') became to read stuff relevant to the Hugos.
By that metric:
44 of the books I finished this year are ones I had started in a previous year. (Which is great, but I have about the same number again still on the pile. :/)
37 were books theoretically relevant to the Hugos, although the vast majority of those are comics, and I already know what I'm nomming for comics, so that's unhelpful really
14 were free review copies, which sounds impressive, but I still have six more LT ER ones to get through, and countless comics ARCs, and I haven't actually reviewed most of the ones I read this year.
21 were research/canon review for writing projects I actually got finished and posted, which is pretty good (we aren't going to talk about how many were research for stuff I didn't get any farther on than research.) And 6 more were related to the trip to Iceland.
That makes 128, so just over half of what I read this year were toward goals, and 122 were just-because-they-were-there reads. I can't decide if it's good that over half of what I read was toward a goal, bad that barely half of what I read was for a goal, or sad that less than half of what I read was just because I felt like it.
Of those 250 books, only 68 were books that are on my shelves, and of those 68, 29 were ones I bought over the course of this year. So the read-down-the-backlog project is... you know. Going. 94 were books from the library were I work (24 of those were comics, 14 kids' picture books) which I guess is inevitable when I work at a library, and another 21 were ILL books (14 comics, and 3 for actual research projects that got written.) 52 got filed under "not library, not mine" which included 10 I read and then got rid of, 28 that were put on the used books shelf at work that I read and then put back, and 12 that were borrowed from friends and relations. There were also 15 ebooks that went in to a fuzzy category of ownership - 5 were public domain from Project Gutenberg, 7 were more recent books available legally online for free, and 3 were from... other places.
I added 336 new books to my librarything catalog, which is not...great. On the upside, only 222 went in the to-read list, the other 114 either being books I'd already read, or things like cookbooks and reference books and coloring books and blank notebooks that don't go on to-read, so *technically* I am reading books faster than I'm acquiring them. \o/ Even if I'm not technically reading the same ones I'm acquiring. (Also, we aren't going to talk about how much I didn't need 114 more cookbooks and whatever.)
(As I write this post I am reading down another list of free-to-reviewers books I can request. Shh, I know how to be strong.)
The total number of books on the owned-and-need-to-read list currently stands at ~2100 (I don't track it to closely, it would be scary.) I also for the first time started keeping not-owned-to-read lists, mostly to keep myself from putting them on hold at the library, now that I'm constantly at the library. I keep a list on the library website of books the library owns; it's at 359; Goodreads has the 69 the library doesn't own. So my total to-read list is now about 2500 books.
Which is good news! It means that if I stop adding stuff to the lists, I will be finished in exactly ten years! Totally doable, right? (...especially the not adding stuff to the lists.)
My reading goals for 2016 are :
200 total books (which is what I started at last year, and had to increase because I was getting too far ahead, but I don't think that'll be the case this year.)
Finish the rest of the started-but-not-finished and review copy books
Before Hugo noms close, read enough Hugo eligible stuff to be comfortable nomming
After Hugo noms close, get through some of those comics you own but haven't read
So far this year, I have read one (1) Running Press miniature, about animal tracks.
Average page count for last year was 208 pages/book, which is pretty good given all those comics and picture books. Average rating is about 3.8, which is a pretty good average rating, I think. I reviewed 68 of them, one way or another, even if two of those reviews just consisted of the word "Sloths!"
That's a better number of reviews than I'd expected but less than I'd like, so next up I'm going to try to do some short reviews of books from last year that really materially changed something in my thinking. (Knowing me they won't be short and I won't finish the post until next year, but I'll try.)
Here is my list of 250 books from 2015 (minus a few that didn't import to LibraryThing for some reason and I can't be bothered to go looking for).
My goodreads account is linked to work people but if you'd like to add me there, pm me or something.
I managed my Goodreads reading challenge, which was for 250 books, but only by reading two little Running Press Miniatures in between turns while board gaming on New Year's Eve. Still, pretty good.
Not quite as impressive as it seems, because of those 250 books:
60 were comic trades or graphic novels (of those, 22 Marvel, 1 DC, and 10 free review copies of non-superhero stuff, 27 assorted others)
24 were elementary-grade chapter books (9 by Ursula Vernon, 7 canon review for exchanges)
54 were picture books (14 kids' storybooks, 14 kids' nonfiction, and 26 adults' picture books - mostly art books or coffeetable books with lots of pictures)
5 were novella or monograph length
There were also three books of beginner piano music I played through.
That leaves 104 of what most people think of when they think "book". That 105 included:
27 novels, of which 10 were either 2015 Hugo nominees or 2016 Hugo possibles;
77 nonfiction books, of which 17 were about silly paranormal topics like UFOs and telepathic begonias.
My main goal in reading this year was to finish the ridiculous number of books that I had started, got distracted from, and set down, in previous years. These weren't bad books, if they were bad I would have gotten rid of them when I stopped, they were just, usually, slow going and took a fair amount of brain, so I'd pick up something easier or something more relevant to what I was currently trying to write before I finished them, and, anyway,the list was getting scary. Related to that, I had a bunch of books I'd gotten through free-if-you-review programs that I then hadn't read and hadn't reviewed.
Between those two the load of guilt was enough that it was interfering with reading being fun. :/
Partway through the year I also bought a Hugo Awards vote, so my secondary goal (which had been just 'read more novels and recent fiction') became to read stuff relevant to the Hugos.
By that metric:
44 of the books I finished this year are ones I had started in a previous year. (Which is great, but I have about the same number again still on the pile. :/)
37 were books theoretically relevant to the Hugos, although the vast majority of those are comics, and I already know what I'm nomming for comics, so that's unhelpful really
14 were free review copies, which sounds impressive, but I still have six more LT ER ones to get through, and countless comics ARCs, and I haven't actually reviewed most of the ones I read this year.
21 were research/canon review for writing projects I actually got finished and posted, which is pretty good (we aren't going to talk about how many were research for stuff I didn't get any farther on than research.) And 6 more were related to the trip to Iceland.
That makes 128, so just over half of what I read this year were toward goals, and 122 were just-because-they-were-there reads. I can't decide if it's good that over half of what I read was toward a goal, bad that barely half of what I read was for a goal, or sad that less than half of what I read was just because I felt like it.
Of those 250 books, only 68 were books that are on my shelves, and of those 68, 29 were ones I bought over the course of this year. So the read-down-the-backlog project is... you know. Going. 94 were books from the library were I work (24 of those were comics, 14 kids' picture books) which I guess is inevitable when I work at a library, and another 21 were ILL books (14 comics, and 3 for actual research projects that got written.) 52 got filed under "not library, not mine" which included 10 I read and then got rid of, 28 that were put on the used books shelf at work that I read and then put back, and 12 that were borrowed from friends and relations. There were also 15 ebooks that went in to a fuzzy category of ownership - 5 were public domain from Project Gutenberg, 7 were more recent books available legally online for free, and 3 were from... other places.
I added 336 new books to my librarything catalog, which is not...great. On the upside, only 222 went in the to-read list, the other 114 either being books I'd already read, or things like cookbooks and reference books and coloring books and blank notebooks that don't go on to-read, so *technically* I am reading books faster than I'm acquiring them. \o/ Even if I'm not technically reading the same ones I'm acquiring. (Also, we aren't going to talk about how much I didn't need 114 more cookbooks and whatever.)
(As I write this post I am reading down another list of free-to-reviewers books I can request. Shh, I know how to be strong.)
The total number of books on the owned-and-need-to-read list currently stands at ~2100 (I don't track it to closely, it would be scary.) I also for the first time started keeping not-owned-to-read lists, mostly to keep myself from putting them on hold at the library, now that I'm constantly at the library. I keep a list on the library website of books the library owns; it's at 359; Goodreads has the 69 the library doesn't own. So my total to-read list is now about 2500 books.
Which is good news! It means that if I stop adding stuff to the lists, I will be finished in exactly ten years! Totally doable, right? (...especially the not adding stuff to the lists.)
My reading goals for 2016 are :
200 total books (which is what I started at last year, and had to increase because I was getting too far ahead, but I don't think that'll be the case this year.)
Finish the rest of the started-but-not-finished and review copy books
Before Hugo noms close, read enough Hugo eligible stuff to be comfortable nomming
After Hugo noms close, get through some of those comics you own but haven't read
So far this year, I have read one (1) Running Press miniature, about animal tracks.
Average page count for last year was 208 pages/book, which is pretty good given all those comics and picture books. Average rating is about 3.8, which is a pretty good average rating, I think. I reviewed 68 of them, one way or another, even if two of those reviews just consisted of the word "Sloths!"
That's a better number of reviews than I'd expected but less than I'd like, so next up I'm going to try to do some short reviews of books from last year that really materially changed something in my thinking. (Knowing me they won't be short and I won't finish the post until next year, but I'll try.)
Here is my list of 250 books from 2015 (minus a few that didn't import to LibraryThing for some reason and I can't be bothered to go looking for).
My goodreads account is linked to work people but if you'd like to add me there, pm me or something.
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The first half of the book is about a bunch of experiments that were done around that time (getting a lot of press!) that measured the electrical potential of the leaves of plants, and claimed that variations in the electrical potential were plants having emotions, and specifically, that plants could feel pain.
Which is not necessarily a stupid idea? There has been a lot of research since then into the surprisingly complex and sophisticated "nervous systems" of plants, which before this nobody was paying attention to.
But they very quickly moved on from that basic idea, to deciding that plants could also learn to fear pain, and would cower in fear if somebody holding pruning shears entered the room, and therefore could clearly see despite not having any visual organs, and then they decided that one plant being injured would cause other nearby plants to be upset even if they were isolated from it, and culminating in the claims that when the researcher was on another continent and got a minor injury, his beloved houseplants back home could sense that he was in pain, at which point it was blatantly obvious to pretty much everyone not directly invested in the research or writing said book that the researchers were seeing what they wanted to see in the electrical potential graphs, not a real effect. (Especially since basically none of it at that point could be replicated.)
..also I had never seen this mentioned in any of the references/summaries I'd read, but even if you buy that the results were real and the researchers believed in it, by the end their thesis was "Plants are fully sentient beings that are exquisitely sensitive to pain, and we should all have more compassion and be better people because we know this, and we're going to prove it to you by torturing a bunch of plants, until they scream, on live TV. Repeatedly." at which point. if you actually believe that, how do you justify still doing the experiments? Surely they could have come up with experiments involving something other than pain at that point? But nope, just more making plants scream, apparently.
Anyway. Unexpectedly, that was only the first half of the book, then it veers into what is basically a history-from-the-fringes of the organic farming and natural foods movements, long before they had become recognizable as today's organic farming and natural foods movements. And there's still a ton of bad science going on, but there's also a lot of really interesting stuff, and some history that underlies things that are still very relevant and that I had never heard of or had realized was that directly connected to the modern movements. So I actually learned a lot more from the second half, I think.
..anyway. Uh. I guess that doesn't answer "was it good". I'm glad I read it? It was painfully credulous and painfully bad at science but other than that not painful to read? I learned a lot more than I expected to learn?
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I think I've heard of the book--at least, I have definitely heard of the talking-to-plants bit, but haven't read it. And I know 0 about the history of the organic farming and natural foods movements so it is fascinating to hear that that is in that book? I love it when that happens.
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Probably it would be a tie between Welcome to Mars, Frontier Wolf, and The Great Escape, which were all books that I read from the school library as a kid and then didn't have a copy of and had been yearning for until my sister got them off Amazon for me for Christmas, and therefore they have the advantage of having gotten to me young; and the Imperial Radch books, which I read for the first time this year but have already re-read multiple times each.....