Educated Guesswork

(or, The Pointlessness of Data)

As promised earlier, I return to announce that I have now read 100 books — according to the database I keep of my books. When previously i made such announcement, I had to express three caveats, to wit:

1. The ‘books’ referred to previously included graphic novels and comics, which perhaps cannot lay claim to full ‘book’ status.
2. The earliest dates of books read are an approximation only (more on this below).
3. I wrote: “whilst the unexamined life is deemed to be unworthy of living, the micromanaged and databased life may only be a debasing of the actual substance of life itself.”

This note is primarily a discursion upon the last point.

How long did it take me to read 100 books? Well, this is where the second caveat becomes noteworthy. As stated above, the dates given for completing each book are only approximations for the first few books in the list. Thus the beginning of the period can only be given by a date ante quem rather than an exact start date. However, given the fact that I didn’t note down in each instance (or any, for that matter) just when I began to read a volume, this was always going to be the case. With that repeated dead horse caveat given, I can state that the 100 books read by me were read between June 17, 2015 (approx.) and October 11, 2016. This is a period of 483 days (I include the ending day), giving an average speed of 1 book per 4.83 days.

1 Book per 4.83 Days

Over the past year or so, I’ve engaged in ‘comfort food’ reading, which perhaps explains the dominance of genre fiction among The One Hundred Books. I might have assumed more of an even split between fiction and non-fiction, given my penchant for history reading. (Though perhaps this is merely delusional aspirations towards intellectual pretensions which I will never, could never, achieve.) In fact, fiction overall outnumbered ‘non-‘ by a factor of about 3-to-1. Specifically, 73 fiction books were read while 27 of the ‘other’ category fell beneath my gaze. Of those 73, the preponderance were mysteries, followed by Science Fiction & Fantasy and (some) literature. To be specific:

Books Read by Genre

Mystery	32
SF & Fantasy	24
Literature	17
Nonfiction	27

Or, for those who prefer charts…

Of course, ‘Nonfiction’ as a category categorizes nothing. Especially given the fact that much so-called ‘nonfiction’ actually peddles outright lies and misstates the truth with an almost religious fervor. Fortunately, we can dig deeper due to the diligence of the book database. Here’s how the ‘Nonfiction’ read over the past 100 books breaks down:

Nonfiction Read

Arts & Photography	3
Children’s Books	1
Foreign Language	2
History	3
Humor	5
Indians of North America	1
Mythology & Folklore	3
Philosophy	1
Poetry	1
Politics & Social Sciences	1
Psychology	2
Religion & Spirituality	3
Science & Math	1

Apparently I like funny books, even when I exempt comics from my lists…

Wow, isn’t this analysis fun? What else can we do with the data? Well, we can look at just how each (broad) category was read (since obviously the broken-down ‘Nonfiction’ genre presents too many subcategories and too few data points to be statistically significant). After playing with those bits a bit, normalizing the data (some of which was done earlier without mentioning it before), and then playing and massaging the spreadsheets, we see the following:

From this it appears that I’ve been reading nonfiction (called ‘Other’ in this chart, which is as good a name as any) at a fairly steady rate over this period, while my perusal of mysteries and science fiction increased pretty recently. Also, so-called ‘literature’ has not been part of my reading diet since the summer. Aren’t we flabbergasted with this insight into my reading history?

Truth be told, I’m slightly less than flummoxed by these data insights. I knew already, for instance, that I’d been on what I referred to as a ‘mystery kick’ in my recent reading, so these Moneyball details are somewhat wasted on me. Also, I am troubled by the collapsing of each book’s experience into a point exactly like that of every other book. Nor do I believe that the reductionism objected to here would be relieved by giving some sort of weighting mechanism to account for such metrics as number of pages, average reading level, importance as judged by reviews in major literary critiques, etc. I have actually given a rating for each — which I won’t provide here — but reducing the subjective experience of reading a book to a single (or even multiple!) points on a 5-point or 10-point or 100-point scale seems not only losing proposition, but simply silly.

The problem is similar to that of value in economics, I believe. The question was sidestepped by John von Neumann in his analysis of games in economics by instead using the concept of ‘utility’ — but even this can lead to some treacherous places. In analysis of such mathematical games as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, if the prison sentence is not a term of years but a possible death penalty, how is one to assess a utility for actually dying? (Putting aside the usual pragmatic difficulties related to assessing application vs. theory, which in this case would necessitate evaluating the likelihood of actual execution as well as the time spent in appeals, etc., etc.) The concept of utility has other intractable difficulties as well, as was noted by Walter Otto in the opening remarks of his commentary on Dionysus, wherein he pointed out that taking a utilitarian perspective of religion was akin to reducing the artistic impulse to a question of “Do I need tapestries to make this room more cozy?”

In the case of my reading, I am at a loss to make an assessment of the utility or even the value of this versus that book. Does reading a mystery about a modern Navaho policeman have a measurable ‘value’ which can be compared to that of reading Dante’s Divine Comedy? How does the ‘value’ of such a modern mystery compare to that of an ancient Chinese mystery? Does reading a 1000-year-old Icelandic saga confer more benefit than re-reading The Hobbit? Perhaps such questions are meaningless, or can only be answered by reading the works themselves.

To which end, I present the list of The One Hundred Books. I’ve included the comic books for merely historical interest (ha!), though of course these do not contribute to the running total, the count being given in the first column of each listing. Herewith, The Books:

The One Hundred Books

On Tuesday, June 21st, I apparently finished my hundredth book since I began recording the same just over a year ago. Of course, this is only a seeming fact, for multiple reasons. Imprimus, this “100 books” total includes comics and graphic novels, which cannot really have the same literary ‘weight’ (not to say ‘mass’) as other texts. Secondus, the earliest books read — according to my database of same — only have rough estimates of when they were completed, and I suspect they were finished perhaps as much as a month earlier than the approximate 6/17/2015 date given. Tertius, and perhaps most telling, whilst the unexamined life is deemed to be unworthy of living, the micromanaged and databased life may only be a debasing of the actual substance of life itself.

Perhaps more to come, perhaps after I can lay claim to one hundred actual books not bound with staples.

*Forgot to mention the particular book which ticked over the counter; ’twas Rumpole of the Bailey, the well-known mystery book by John Mortimer. The stories are somber, if not actually despondent.