Continuing the tradition of sharing my reading stats on the blog at the end of the year, here are the numbers for the recently closed 2016. Unsurprisingly, both the number of books and the amount of pages consumed have dropped this year: 22 books totaling about 6300 pages in 2016 compared to 23 books with 7600 pages in 2015. There are several reasons for this, from more personal travels during the year (about which I plan to write at length here, hopefully during 2017) and the increased amount of long-form articles I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to.
Naturally, the average length of a book also decreased to about 300 pages from 350 last year, but the average rating increased slightly to 3.6 stars. It was a year when I have (again) diversified my reading beyond science-fiction and fantasy, and as a result the 3 five-star-rated books have all been of the more traditional fiction genre. It was also a year of being slightly disappointed by some of my favorite authors for novels that I feel don’t live up to their usual standards: from the classics Yukio Mishima and Mario Vargas Llosa to the non-conformist Chuck Palahniuk and the SF authors Peter F. Hamilton and Peter Watts. On the flip side I was pleasantly impressed by The Chronoliths, so maybe I should revisit more authors I don’t normally enjoy to see if their other books are better.
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