My Reading Year in Review: 2004

Sorry, this isn’t a retrospective of the publishing universe circa 2004, but a short summary of my own notes for the year. It’s provided as a look at my reading habits, for those of you who care.

2004 marked a record-setting year of sorts, given how I read 300 books during the year, easily beating the previous record-holding year of 1995 and 1997 (260 book each) and substantially above my twenty-first century average of 200 books/year. Three factors explain this rise: First, February/March jury duty on the Grand Prix de la Science Fiction et du Québécois, a literary prize which required me to read some 25 books I otherwise wouldn’t have. The pace of the year having thus been set, it wasn’t much of a stretch to aim for a total of 300. Not coincidentally, I was a far more impatient reader this year: substandard books (of which they were not a few) got the speed-reading treatment. Finally, the month of December was dedicated to reaching the 300 total through selective readings of short books and whole evenings dedicated to reading (oh, sweet sacrifice). The funny thing is that four years ago, I took a look at my declining totals and opined that buying a house meant never having as much time for reading than before; is it any coincidence if I went back to my non-owner totals the year my mortgage got paid off?

(If pages are your thing rather than the number of books, that’s 99,033 pages in a year, or an average of 330 pages per book. Yes, dammit, I missed out on the big 100Kpages)

Good news: Diversification is in full effect as merely 28% (83 books out of 300) of my reading material was categorized as Science Fiction, still outshining non-fiction (21%, including humour) as its closest competitor. Fantasy made an unusually strong showing this year at 12%, squeaking under thrillers at 13% (though the mystery/crime genre goes up to 25% once you throw together crime, military fiction and thrillers) Taken together, SF&F (and horror) made up 46% of my reading menu, with a scant 7% left for so-called mainstream fiction and romance. (Yes, romance. Deal with it.)

The vast majority (70%) of the books read this year were bought, not always new. A significant number (8%) came from the Grand Prix secretariat, while gifts accounted for a rather high 15% of the total, and that’s because that category includes "getting a whole book collection". Libraries, contests, convention book giveaways and friendly loans completed the total. Only one book, Neuromancer, was re-read from my existing collection.

Given how much of my reading takes place on the bus, it’s no surprise if over 61% of all book read this year were in mass-market paperback format. Despite my general loathing of trade paperbacks, they still made up for 21% of all books read, ahead of the 16% in hardcover. (A smattering of oddball formats completed the total, from The McAtrix Derided‘s mini-hardcover to America (The Book)‘s oversize format.)

If ever you find yourself wondering how much a serious reading addiction can cost, come back here and glance at the C$4,787.19 sum of all the cover prices for those 300 books (Average: C$15.96). But, hey, I don’t scour used book sales for nothing: It "merely" cost me C$1,301.61 for it all (average: C$4,95, though there’s a very long tail after the 45 books that cost me C$10 or more), which is about twice the total for 2003. Yes, paying off the mortgage has created a book-buying monster…

Distribution of books per year followed the usual distribution, what with the majority of works being 2-4 years behind, as per a healthy paperback-to-used-sales life-cycle. Most (53%) of the books read were published after 1999, though a significant number (10%) had a 2004 publication date. There was, obviously, a good correlation between a 2004 publication date and the price I paid for the book, but let’s not go there.

55 books (18%) were read in French; all others in English.

Finally, should you be curious, here’s my (highly variable) top-16 list for the year:

The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross (2004)
America (The Book), Jon Stewart & The Daily Show (2004)
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde (2001)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
The Leaky Establishment, David Langford (1984, 2003 re-issue)
Fire and Ice: US, Canada and the Myth of Convergent Values, Michael Adams (2003)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984, re-read)
A Place So Foreign and 8 More, Cory Doctorow (2003)
The Poet, Michael Connelly (1996)
Angels & Demons, Dan Brown (2000)
High Score: The Illustrated History of Video Games, Rusel DeMaria & Johnny L. Wilson (2002)
Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
Ghosts of Vesuvius, Charles Pellegrino (2004)
Double Fold, Nicholson Baker (2001)
Of Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan (2003)
Scores, John Clute (2003)

As you can see from the above list, I wasn’t completely disconnected from the flow of current-day publishing in 2004. In addition to the three most-recent titles in the list above, I’ll single out The Zenith Angle (Sterling), Iron Sunrise (Stross), Eastern Standard Tribe (Doctorow) and The John Varley Reader (Varley) as noteworthy 2004 releases. For 2003, you can add Phaos (Bergeron; in French), Blind Lake (Wilson), Singularity Sky (Stross), Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (Franken), Veniss Underground (Vandermeer), The Da Vinci Code (Brown), Tilt (Shrady) and Ilium (Simmons) on my recommended short-list. Happy reading…