I am at home sick with the flu, but I have entertained myself by making charts of my reading habits. I reorganized my bookshelves earlier this week by read and unread, but then further by genre. I noticed some definite patterns taking place so I decided to see what the patterns looked like in numbers.
The first thing I looked at was how many books I had read my read shelf from each "genre."
As you can see, most of the books I have read are either general nonfiction or classic fiction, which didn't surprise me. What did surprise me is that I've read almost as many YA & MG books as I have essay collections. When I thought about this it made sense, since a lot of the books I have are from junior high and high school and several of those are YA & MG. I was really surprised by the amount of poetry I had!
I then looked at how many books in each genre were on my TBR shelf.
Once again, most of the books I own are general nonfiction with general fiction and classic fiction also making a large part of the books I own. Just by looking at these numbers it seems like I am extremely likely to read the YA and MG books that I purchase, but I'm less likely to read the historical fiction I purchase. When I first started blogging I was a lot more interested in historical fiction so I purchased more of it, but after awhile I became less interested and now I have some historical fiction I've never gotten around to reading. I've never bought much science fiction until recently, so it will be interesting to see how many of those books I end up reading.
The last thing I looked at was how many books in each genre I've read since starting my blog in October 2009.
Clearly I've spent most of my time reading general nonfiction and YA & MG. This, once again, surprised me. I never read many YA books before I started blogging and never thought I would. It must just be all the great YA bloggers out there! It's interesting that general fiction and classic fiction are evenly split, although I noticed most of my classic fiction is made up of books I read for class. If I wasn't in school I think general fiction would probably be a little higher.
How are your shelves organized? Are you surprised by the different genres you see there?
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