Analysis: The 6th Hundred Books

Many months have now passed since I promised some sort of data analysis of the most recent hundred books read, and that promise itself was in a listing of those selfsame books, posted more than a month after my initial notification that I had passed the self-imposed milestone of having finished 600 books. What can I say? I am, among other things, a dawdler.

[Nota bene: Once again, I do not include those items in the Comics & Graphic Novels category in my book count, though they are included in both the full list of books read as well as in some parts of the analysis which follows.]

My reading pace was perhaps as great as it has ever been, certainly the fastest since I began measuring, at least when judged on a ‘per book’ basis (as we shall see). Only 112 days elapsed between completing the last tranche of one hundred and finishing the sixth hundredth book. At one point, indeed, I thought I might average a book a day (if we include the comics and graphic novels the total volumes read rises to 110, so I just missed that rare pace even then), but my ridiculously celeric rate faltered at the end of the hundred. The speedy tempo was doubtless due to two primary factors: reading very (very!) short books (mostly children’s and mere pamphlets), as well as reading the briskest of mysteries. Thus, the faster pace was accompanied by a concomitant drop in total pages read, with only 15,877 pages read in the last hundred books, contrasted with the 23,725 read in the previous hundred. This is a drop of 33%-a full third! That said, however, the pages per day rate jumped up by almost the same factor.

1 Book Read per 1.12 Days

This ‘Ludicrous Speed’ lowered the overall days per book number even more drastically than happened during the previous hundred books. The overall pace for non-comics dropped as low as the earlier tempo for all books, to 3.38, and the reading rate for all books, comics included, just missed dropping below 3 days per volume. It is not only almost, it is certain, that the pace will be longer in the next tranche, as almost five months has already elapsed since that last report, and I’ve just managed to read a shade over fifty books so far. (For those playing along at home, the total number of days taken to read through Book #600 is 2026.)

Average Time to Read a Book

	non-Comics	All
1st hundred	4.83	3.63
2nd hundred	6.19	5.79
3rd hundred	2.79	2.74
4th hundred	2.97	2.70
5th hundred	2.40	2.12
6th hundred	1.12	1.02
All	3.38	3.00

Though I’ve almost given up, I still wish to finish reading all the books in my library. I first struggled to come up with a date by which I might complete this project in this post, though later reflection (in this post here) both showed an earlier date but also wove a cautionary mathematical tale of the factor of buying new books to add to my collection. In that later link, I noted that I’ve been buying more books than ever, due to online sales which themselves can ultimately be traced to COVID and its dominion over all our lives. Thus, I first thought I’d finish on December 7, 2124, then I dropped that to sometime in 2108, and then thought I’d be done by November 7, 2102. By using the same back-of-the-envelope calculation used at last report (though I literally used the back of an envelope this time), I find that I have 8773 unread books in my collection at the moment I finished Book #600 (or had, as more books have stuck to my fingers since January 2, when I finished that book). If I assume my current, just calculated, total book reading pace of 3.00 days per book, that gives … lemme see … I come up with an EFD (Estimated Finish Date) of June 20, 2093. Which is the first time we’ve seen an estimated date of completion within this strange 21st Century, so that’s something. Here’s the skinny (for comparison you can see last time’s numbers here):

Reading Rate: 1 Book per 3.00 Days (includes Comics)

Time to Finish Collection: 72 Years and 3/4 months

Estimated Finish Date (EFD): June 20, 2093

Now, I’m sure y’all have all been following with baited breath my other, slightly more complicated assessment of how long it will take me to actually finish my collection, which I first promulgated in this post here. This is necessary because, in the mere 112 days it took me to read 110 books (including comics for the sake of this calculation), I seem to have acquired 175 new volumes for my library. *Sigh* But anyway, here’s that earlier formula, which takes into account my book purchasing pace in addition to my book reading pace:

(2.3)  

Formula simply says that the time required to finish reading my library is equal to the initial number of books divided by the net consumption rate of books, which is the Reading Rate less the Purchase Rate . As I noted in that earlier post, as long as the Reading Rate is greater than the Purchase Rate, I will eventually finish the collection.

Using the same rough calculations I made last time, I find I’ve read (or had read at the time I finished Book #600) 675 volumes (including those pesky comics), with a total count of 10,014 books in my collection (again, excluding dupes), and that equals 7,373 unique volumes (as I told you in the previous post). Now, given an approximate start date of June 17, 2015 for my data tracking project, this give us a reading rate of 0.296 (I use the non-comic totals to make the news worse than perhaps it actually is), and the purchase rate is seen to be (10,014 minus 7,373) equal to 1.30, giving us a value for of … hmm, -7,336 days, which is almost three hundred more than … Oh, crud. I see what I did now. the equation

(2.3)  

is just a rectangular hyperbola around the xy-axes, defined by the value of solely. As long as that value is negative, it lives in a negative space with asymptotes below both of the axes, and thus exists only in some imaginary theoretical world. In other words, as long as the purchase rate is greater than the reading rate, it’s hopeless. In other other words, I’m hopeless at math. *Sigh*

(This also means that the number I thought hopeful last time was actually worse than before, only I didn’t notice because I was living in a negative world. Double *sigh* I sure do suck at math.)

I’ve already noted most of the significant factors in my reading patterns over those last hundred books: shorter books and lots o’ mysteries. This is borne out in the Genre breakdown I usually provide. The biggest change is that Children’s Books beat out the Science Fiction and the Literature & Fiction genres. The full list of all books read I gave you quite a while back, and now here’s the usual listing of the breakdown by genre, followed by the usual fancy-schmancy pie chart.

Books Read by Genre

Breaking down the Nonfiction books further shows, besides the predominance of Books on Books, the usual hodgepodge:

Nonfiction Breakdown

Books on Books	11
History	5
Outdoors & Nature	4
Humor	3
Militaria	3
Wacko	3
Health, Mind & Body	2
Reference	2
Religion & Spirituality	2
Anthropology	1
Arts & Photography	1
Bidness	1
D&D	1
Foreign Language	1
Philosophy	1
Poetry, Drama & Criticism	1
Secret Societies	1

Once more turning to page count analysis, as I did the last time and the time before that and the time before that, I note that though my reading pace jumped up dramatically, as I said earlier, the total pages read was significantly less—due to reading shorter volumes during this last slice of a hundred books. For what it’s worth, here’s a chart showing the cumulative pages read, with a linear trendline.

Looking at this on a per day basis yields the following chart:

So, although I read fewer pages, I read those pages at a terrific pace, a ‘Ludicrous Speed’ of 147.4 pages per day this last hundred, versus 103.2 for the previous set.

147.4 Pages Read per Day

Since I also read 10 items classified as Comics or Graphic Novels, the above figure drops somewhat when those comics are excluded from the calculation. (I use the total books read for the generally promulgated Pages/Day rate, since the small page count of most comic books is reflected in this stat, whereas it is not in the Days per Book statistic.) Exempting those books gives a slightly lower page per day rate of 141.2 pages per day, which is still much faster any previous record. The lower reading pace for non-comics is shown by the lighter grey-blue line in the figure above.

The page count per book dropped drastically, to 158.8 pages per book from the previous 237.25. Including comics drops this further to a nice round 150 pages per book (versus 219.2 from the last set).

Average Book Length: 158.8 Pages

The total number of pages—as previously mentioned—dropped just as precipitously, to to 16,505 pages from the previous 24,771 pages, well over 8k less in the last tranche. Removing comics from our consideration takes this down to 15,877 (versus 23,725 for the other set).

Total Pages Read (non comics): 15,877

The average rating actually increased slightly in this last set, to 3.85 on a five-point scale. I still focus on books I think I may want to get rid of, though I haven’t had access to my book room for about five or six months now. (The weighted average turns out to be 3.9, weighting that is by page count, meaning that the longer the better, at least in this set.)

Average Rating for Books Read: 3.85

That’s it for now. It shouldn’t be too much longer until it’s time for the next set of a hundred books, so we’ll talk more then. Ta!