Bibliophile’s reading report for 2007

I finally got my act together and compiled the annual report.

Total books read in 2007:
142. This is 18 books fewer than in 2006, and 140 fewer than in 2005 (an exceptional reading year for me), but still pretty good when you consider that it makes nearly 3 books a week.

Last year I was very focused on cookbooks and skimmed through 18 of them in search of interesting recipes, reading all the titles and a number of recipes from each book, but as I can’t claim to have actually read any of them all the way through, they are not included in the tally. Also not included are the books I began reading in 2007 and will hopefully finish in 2008.

Breakdown:

Fiction: 97 (68,3%)
Non-fiction: 43 (30,3%)
Mixed: 2 (1,4%)

The mixed books are The Literary Gourmet, which combines real recipes and passages from novels, and The Science of Discworld which combines popular science with fantasy. In addition there are 3 books that are ostensibly autobiographies, but have a distinct flavour of being more or less fictionalised. However, since the Icelandic National Library classifies them as non-fiction, so will I.
My non-fiction percentage is up 4,7% from 2006. I would like to make it to 35% non-fiction this year.

Total no. of pages read: 38901.
Average number of pages per book: 274. This is 22 pages (on average) longer than in 2006.
Number of books under 100 pages long: 1. I think I will leave this item out of the next report, unless I get a job reviewing children’s books ;-)
Number of books 300+ pages long:70 (49%). This percentage was only 26,8% in 2006.

Re-reads: 8 (5,6%).
Library and loan books: 21 (14,8%)
E-books: 4
Audio books: 0
Translated books: 13 (9%)
I re-read fewer books in 2007 that in 2006, and much fewer library books (down to 14,8% from 21,25%).

Books published before 1900: 4. I aim to read at least 12 this year (see my New Year’s reading resolution).
Books published after 2000: 31 (21,8%). This is 4,9% more than in 2006.

Average rating per book (out of a possible 5+): 3+
Most common rating (out of a possible 5+): 4 (45 books, 31,7%)

Languages: English (132: 93%), Icelandic (10: 7%). My percentage of Icelandic books is up by 6,3% since last year, which is good, but could be better.

Breakdown by genre:
As I said (in a lot more words) last year, this breakdown is by main genre, so genre-crossing books get classified under one genre even if they could possibly belong to as many as three. Non-fiction where I only read a few books in the genre is collected under "miscellaneous non-fiction" . The only time I use a fuller genre classification is when there are enough of them to be statistically interesting.
A few books were very hard to classify, not only the two mixed fiction and non-fiction books, but also a book about “true” supernatural events. I ended up classifying that one under non-fiction, since there is such a strong belief in the veracity of the stories therein. The other two ended up under the fiction category, just to simplify matters. Cookoff ended up in the travel category, since, although it is about cooking and eating, it is just as much about travel to different places.
The non-travel biographies and memoirs were too few to warrant a category of their own this year.

Crime, mystery and action, including one non-fiction popular criminology book: 62 (43,7%, up by 3,1%)
Romance: 10 (7%, down by 1,75%)
Fantasy, sci-fi, fairy tales and supernatural horror: 19 (13,4%, down by 1,6%)
Miscellaneous fiction, incl. novels, short story collections, etc.: 10 (7% down by 10%)
Travel, memoirs of places and geography: 17 (12%, down by 0,5%)
Miscellaneous non-fiction, minus that one criminology book included in the crime category: 24 (16,9 %, up by 8,15%)

Out of these, 12 were written with teenagers or children in mind. They belong to various genres and are counted in the relevant categories.

Most read authors:
My most read author in 2007 was Ngaio Marsh. At the end of 2007 I had acquired all 32 of her Roderick Alleyn detective novels, and I have been reading them in the order of publication. I am taking a break from her for a while in order to concentrate on finishing the 52 mystery authors challenge, but she may still come out as my most read author of 2008.
As I continued my rereading of Terry Pratchett’s books that I started in 2006, he came second.

Ngaio Marsh: 11
Terry Pratchett: 6
Georges Simenon: 5
Madeleine L'Engle, Jennifer Crusie: 4
Rex Stout, Hendrik Ottósson: 3
Tess Gerritsen, Ruth Rendell, Ruth Reichl, Robert B. Parker, Nancy Pearl, Nancy Martin, Jill Ker Conway, J.D. Robb, Eric Newby, Andrea Camilleri: 2

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Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

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Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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