Thursday, March 01, 2007

Booking Through Thursday: But, Who's Counting?



1. How many books would you say you read in an average month?
2. In a year?
3. Over the last five years?
4. The last 10?
I'm afraid I am counting! Thanks to LibraryThing and my tags I was able to pretty accurately count the number of books in the past 17 years that I have read. I found the measures of central tendency and quickly made the graphs to illustrate the number of books I have read per month over this time.

Willing to overlook the number of romance novels that I never counted and the 24 books that were recorded without any dates, I found that I have read a mean of 3.1 books a month. However the median number of books I have read per month is 2.6, which I feel is more accurate.

The median in this case is probably more accurate because the number of books read per month varies greatly: from a maximum of 6.9 books a month in July to a minimum of 1.7 books a month in November. This variation is accounted for by my academic calendar. I am home all of July. Also, my grandson spends all of July with me. Reading time is important to us and we gobble up those books!

My data for the books I read in a year, five years, or a decade is less accurate. Apparantly I am not as concerned with the time in which I read a book as with the authors and titles. According to my obviously faulty data, I read an average of 37 books a year, 189 books every five years and 183 books every decade. This discrepancy may be due to the poor record-keeping. However, it could also be due to an event in my life which prevented me from reading for large periods of time.

I have always wanted to do an accounting of the number of books I read. Today's questions provided a perfect opportunity for me to indulge my counting compulsion! (This is what math teachers do on long boring vacation days!)

Thank you for visiting. Have a great day!

_/\_/\_

12 comments:

  1. Holy Crow! Nice graphs. I'm impressed.

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  2. Hi - love your graphs! I haven't tried the LibrayThing yet, but I do recall saying that I will try it whenever am ready. But for right now am keeping mine in my files on my computer.

    WOW I think I read more book in a year(71) than you but then I wish I remember how much I read in the last 5 or 10 years. I wasn't keeping track back then until 2 years ago. But I'm sure you read more than I did in the last 5 and 10 years :)

    Oh by the way - you right, watching TV show sure does gobble up the times of our reading *grin*...thanks for stopping by my blog :)

    Happy Booking Through Thursday! Here is Mine!

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  3. Wow, I'm totally impressed with the stats and the graphs! Way to go :) Love that you keep track and that you use Library Thing. That's on my "one day" list, to get my books setup at Library Thing.

    Great meme, loved reading your answers. Hope you have a wonderful Thursday, and Happy Reading :)

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  4. I am extremely impressed with your stats and your graphs! I just signed up at LibraryThing a few weeks ago and now I know what all those tags might be useful for someday.

    Thanks for stopping by my blog.

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  5. Love the graphs! Although I was never any good at math, I am a retired English teacher so my academic year encouraged lots of reading! Thanks for visiting my blog!

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  6. Hi Meeyauw, I'm impressed with those graphs you have created! No wonder you are a Maths teacher!! LOL. Seems like I better keep track on the books I read now, hehe. Happy reading and Happy BTT!

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  7. Love the stats! and the math. And of course the books.
    Yay to math teachers who read.

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  8. Whew! What great graphs. I read about four or five books a week, rarely less. But...I have half-an-hour on the train each way and it's amazing how much reading can be done then. I also read before going to sleep at night...and any other time I get a few minutes!

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  9. Great. I'm leaning toward a library thing subscription.
    I tried to do a plot of something the other day but couldn't format it to appear on blogger. I still have a lot to learn, obviously.

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  10. Hi Sarala:

    On a Mac, it's simple to do this. You go to print your final graph (or print anything for that matter) and you are given a choice of viewing a PDF file or printing normally. You view the PDF file and then save that PDF file as a jpg file, and that's all there is.

    My understanding is that PCs will have this capability soon if not now with Vista.

    Hope this helps!

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  11. I haven't tried Library Thing yet because there's just way to many to enter! But I DID do massive amounts of number-crunching last week, when I finally finished entering my reading lists from the last 11 years. I discovered I average 24.6 books a month, and traditionally read more books in August than in any other month....

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  12. You are rather alarmingly amazing! And I mean that in the best possible way!

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