Geek counting

Number crunching the books.

A near disaster with a glass of water and 11 years of  reading diaries saw me decide to type up all the books I've listed in various diaries and journals over the past decade.

It has (unsurprisingly) taken me quite a while to get through the various notebooks and diaries, and while I don't have the stereotypical doctor handwriting sometimes deciphering my notes was interesting.  I'm also pretty sure that I've lost a couple of months from 2009 - I can't believe that I only read 8 books in three months even with a trip to Canada and a new job.

The stats from January 2005 to December 2015 are now crunched and even I was quite surprised to discover that in ten years I'd noted 2973 books.

It is very clear that when I still worked in book retail I read a lot more, however I was a children's specialist and for several years part of the team responsible for selecting the 5-8 book of the month meaning that every month I read an awful lot of shorter reads. At some point in my record keeping I decided not to note down what are commonly known as 'picture books' - everything has 48 pages or more.

Since starting work in the library I can see that I read a lot more non fiction and that I take a lot more gambles on my reading, there is no pattern at all to what I read - I really will try anything.

One thing that also came through from my notes is just how often I re-read a few authors, a couple of these are typical mid-twentieth century school/family story authors and the third is a contemporary, feminist, fantasy author.  On average I read many of the books by these authors once a year.
I was a little surprised that books I consider favourites, such as Little Women, don't feature highly on my rereads list but other books by Alcott, such as Eight Cousins, reoccur much more often.

Some books that I felt sure would appear on this list aren't there and I wonder if it is because I read them before 2005 or if I just didn't note them which is possible, until I found the right journal:

This lets me list the author, title, date read and gives me a line for notes about the book and the layout lets me note my reading for two years in each volume.*

What I found interesting reading back through all of the lists was just how many of these books I could actually remember in some detail. A few I hadn't listed the author but as soon as I popped the books in to a search engine it all came flooding back, looking at the dates I read some books also stirred memories, some good and some less good. Looking at some titles I am instantly transported back to where I read them - Greek beaches, slow trains, plane journeys the lot.

Right all of this typing has eaten into my reading time and as today has been designated #readabookday I'd better get on with it.

*On looking for a picture of my preferred reading diary I've discovered it is now out of print so I am off to bulk order the ones left in stock.

Random thoughts about books and authors

A lot of tweets in my time line have been about sexism lately, and not just from the @EverydaySexism feed.  Fuel was added to the fire this week when Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, called for segregated laboratories as women were just too distracting to work with, and cried too much.  I may have oversimplified his points here but like a lot of people he made me very cross.  The comeback on Twitter were great with people (men and women) posting photos of themselves at work in the scientific world with the tag #DistractinglySexy.

I am lucky in the way that I have never felt discriminated against for being female but I have regularly experienced sexism, probably from people who are unaware their behaviour can be thought of as such.  For example I am a keen photographer and I am looking to buy some new equipment in the next year or so.  Mr Norfolkbookworm and I went to a camera shop and although it was me with the good camera around my neck, trying new models and asking questions the salesman repeatedly spoke only to M and handed him all the cameras to try.  Little things like that happen far too often.

However I am not sure how I feel about one response to this from the book world.  Recently an author I admire made the 'provocation' that 2018 should be a year when only women writers are published.  This is in response to another study that has shown that books about women are less likely to win book prizes.

I am what you could call a prolific reader, from my journal I can see that so far this year I have read 81 books.

46 of these have been by male authors.  Now as I am studying Shakespeare and other dramatists from the late 16th Century I thought I'd take these out of the totals...

Thus so far this year I have read 68 books, of which 33 have been by men.

And if I am honest I am quite happy with that.  I read a book because it appeals to me not because of the gender of the author.  In fact due to another project that I'll talk about later in the year a further twelve books I've read this year have been selected for me and I've had no say on the gender of the author and again this has had no bearing on my views of the books.

To me a book is either good or it isn't and that has nothing to do with the author's gender, it is about the subject.  I like historical fiction, 16th century plays, and Greek and Roman classics - these are traditionally by men and about men and I know my life would be poorer.

I think that as women we do need to pull down barriers and make sure that sexism is relegated to a thing of the past but I am not sure that publishing female authors only is the way forward. I'm still thinking about this a lot and these are just two of the thoughts going around in my mind...

The book trade has always seemed a heavily female dominated industry to me and yet the books are about men...

Are there more books about/by men because as a rule women read more and will read widely where as men need encouraging to read....

For those interested my book stats at the nearly half way point in the year are:

• 81 books read
• 46 by male authors
• 33 non fiction books
• 15 plays
• 11 books in translation

many thanks to my friend Sam @samruddock who blogs here for really making me think about this with a random tweet about his reading habits.

Time to celebrate

6 Years in a row!

Whilst the headline in this news article is very depressing the fifth paragraph has made me and a lot of other people happy today.

For the sixth year in succession the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library has retained the status of busiest library in the country.

In fact we have retained the double crown - we issue the most books of any library in the country and we have the most visitors through our doors.

We know we can't rest on our laurels - there are lots of other fantastic libraries out there all of whom would love to take our crown but thanks to the support of our customers, a County Council that sees the benefits of a world class library and all of the guests we've hosted we can add this celebration to Christmas 2012.

I am well underway with event planning for 2013, January looks exciting and then in February we are working with the British Library and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to bring their Writing Britain exhibition to the city.  The British Library are loaning us some items and we have a full week of events planned to celebrate this.  More details will be coming early in the New Year but it you are on Twitter please do follow the project to keep fully up-to-date with our plans.