As a child, I was a voracious reader (if only to rack up Accelerated Reader points, iynyk). However, as the story often goes, my reading plummeted in high school. In my 10th-grade English class, we watched more movies than we read books, and in my 12th-grade Literature class, I managed to read only two of the ten-plus books we were assigned.
Thankfully, college brought back my love for reading, in part due to two close friends who were English majors. Their passion for books reinvigorated my love for reading, and the summer after my first year of college I dove back in by reading one book per week over the summer. Since this reentry into reading, I consider myself a generally consistent reader, even going so far as to declare reading “a hobby of mine” when meeting new people.
With that being said, I by no means consider myself a particularly quick or prolific reader, but I do consider myself someone who collects copious amounts of personal data about myself. To that end, I have logged not only every book I have read since 2016 on Goodreads (yes I know I should switch to StoryGraph) but also a star rating, a finish date, and even occasionally a review. ▸ Click here for some additional comments about the data if interested.
I have tracked the date I finished every book I have read since 2016 on Goodreads. I did not track the start date, but since I rarely read more than one book at a time, I imputed a start date for every book using the completion date of the last book I had read. This methodology has the effect of exaggerating my average reading rate. For example, it may appear it took me 30 days to read a book but in actuality, it took me a week because I did not start the book until three weeks after I had finished the most recent book. While not a perfect representation of my reading over the last few years, it should work relatively well.
Scroll along below as I explore my reading over the last eight years.
