2015: By the Numbers

Another calendar year is in the books, and in just three more weeks, I will mark the completion of nine years of Book Chase blogging.  I am really looking forward to 2016 and the completion of a tenth year online talking about books, publishing, bookstores, libraries, and any other bookish topics that might come up.  I have greatly enjoyed the last nine years, and I truly treasure all of the friends and contacts I've made over the years.  Without you guys (and the wonderful internet that allows us to so easily find kindred spirits) none of this would have been possible - or nearly so much fun. I thank you.

As always, I enjoy looking at my year-end reading numbers because that process brings back such great reading memories - and 2015 was another of those good years filled with remarkable books that I will remember for a long time.  2015 will most be remembered, I imagine, as the year that Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman was finally published - be that a good or a bad thing.  And, sadly, it was a year in which some of my favorite authors passed from the scene, something that seems to be happening to me with increasing regularity as the years fly by.

I've previously posted my Top 10 lists in fiction and nonfiction, but this is what the rest of the year looked like for me:

Number of Books Read - 118

Fiction - 84:

Novels - 75

Short Story Collections - 9 

Nonfiction - 34:

Memoirs - 10

Biographies - 3

Books on Books- 3

Sports - 3

Travel - 4

True Crime- 2

History -  3

Science - 3

Sociology - 3

Written by Men - 73

Written by Women - 41

Multiple Authors - 4

Audio Books - 2

E-Books - 32

Library Books - 46

Review Copies - 37

From My Shelves - 33

Translations: 6

Pages per Day: 100

Total Number of Pages Read (Excluding audio books) = 36,642 

I'm disappointed (as usual) by the small number of works by foreign authors that I read in the past year.  I did manage to read 17 books from other countries but 11 of those were published in either the U.K. or in Canada, and that seems too easy.  In addition, I read four from Italy, and one each from the Netherlands and the Philippines, but that's something I really need to increase in 2016.  Yeah, we'll see how that works out...oh, and I see a huge jump in the number of e-books I'm reading these days...32 of 118 means that 27% of the books I read in 2015 were of the electronic type.  That's something I never thought I would see happen, and I'm not quite sure what to think about that.

Now it is time to move on to 2016...let's do it!