{"id":11786,"date":"2009-01-07T15:50:22","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T20:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/01\/07\/11786.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:52","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:52","slug":"year-in-books-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/01\/07\/year-in-books-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Year in Books 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yes, it’s every Gentle Reader’s favorite time of year, the time when YHB blah blah numbers, blah blah books, blah blah trends, and winds it up with Ten Or Eleven Books I Liked. Can you taste the excitement?\n

First of all, YHB read 114 books in 2008, a fairly normal number, but the details reveal a few startling things, starting with five-year records: a low of 28 re-reads, and a high of 86 new reads. The high is only one more than 2005, but is significant (I think) because it appears to be a direct result of the decrease in re-reads, five below 2005’s 33. I’ve now tracked five years of books, which allows me to make trendlines and pretty charts and things.\n

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See? Pretty chart. As we can see from the chart here<\/i> and here<\/i>, and these points here<\/I> and here<\/i>, Your Humble Blogger is a hopeless nerd. Ah,well.\n

Seriously, it appears as if Your Humble Blogger’s reading of not-marketed-for-kids specfic is decreasing with an alarming rapidity. Well, alarming if it were worth caring about. I mean, it’s not as if it would be morally problematic if I read more non-genre fiction and non-fiction than specfic, it’s just that there’s a chart, you see, with a line going down. And I suppose it could be argued that replacing five to ten books of not-marketed-for-kids specfic with five to ten books of marketed-for-kids specfic is more likely caused by a shift in marketing techniques than by a shift in preferred reading habits. Or by a shift in library shelving, which is as likely as anything, now that I think about it.\n

Also, in sample spaces that range from 58 to 86, it’s likely that a significant chunk of the difference is due to my placing things in different categories. For instance, I put The Book Thief<\/a> under YA\/SF, despite feeling quite strongly that it ought not to be considered as such (although presumably the marketers know what they are doing for sales purposes). I also put The Arrival<\/a> under YA\/SF rather than Graphic Novels, despite that being clearly wrong and unsupported by any rationality whatsoever. Dropping those two would bring YA\/SF down to 26%, making the line more pointy, looking like 2007 was an outlier. I also could just put all the specfic into one big category without worrying about its target audience, although that seems less helpful for me. On the other hand, I have the category of non-genre fiction<\/i>, which makes no sense at all, not only because it has in the past included westerns which are about as genre as I could imagine, but because this year it includes three Victorian novels and four Georgian novels, making each of those sub-categories as viable a category as (f’r’ex) Graphic Novels or Plays.\n

Enough. It’s time for the moment y’all have been waiting for, particularly if you are iced in, bored and cranky with nothing to entertain you: Your Humble Blogger’s Annual List of Ten or Eleven Books Enjoyed for the First Time in the Past Year.\n