2007 Books in Review

(Ben) I've read more this year than any year of my life due to ample reading time as I commute to work every day, so I wanted to write a "Year in Review" post to sum up my opinions on what I've read. Here goes:

I read 31 books this year, all of which have reviews posted on this blog. Jenn read 3 others that I haven't gotten around to, so they're not included in these statistics, although I definitely want to give an honorable mention to Crossing to Safety which she rated as a 5 star book. I've actually read Crossing to Safety, but it was quite a while ago and I can't remember it all that well. Anyway, of my 31 books I've broken them down into the following genres:

Classics - 8 books
Fantasy - 6 books
Memoirs - 2 books
Modern - 4 books
Mystery - 4 books
Non-fiction - 5 books
Philosophy - 1 book
Young Adult - 1 book

There was 1 book, The Pit: A Story of Chicago, that I didn't know how to classify. It's not really a classic because not that many people have even heard of it, but it was written about 80 years ago so you can hardly call it modern either. Let's put it in its own category: Muckraker. That's the best I can do with that one! Also, you may wonder what I mean by "modern." Books in this genre would be (1) fiction (2) written within the last 15 or 20 years and (3) not fantasy, mystery, or any of the other genres. In other words, this genre is basically just the modern version of the "classics" genre.

On average, I gave 3.6 stars (out of 5) to these 31 books. In my head, when I'm rating a book, I like to think of 3 as an average book, meaning it wasn't really remarkable in any way, but it wasn't painful to read either. So I feel pretty good about an average of 3.6, since I hope that I read better than average books in general, but I'm not being an easy rater and just giving them all 5 stars either. Remember with these ratings that it's just my general impression of the book, so there's no strict scale for how I rate them. One book might get an extra star for being really well-written, another for making me laugh, another for impacting my life. The best books (the 5-stars) combine several or all of these elements. Also, I tend to add extra weight to the "impacting my life" category, since that's the main reason why I read.

You can get a feel for my preferences by looking at average stars by genre:
Classics - 4.3
Fantasy - 3.3
Memoirs - 3
Muckraker - 4
Modern - 4.3
Mystery - 2.6
Non-fiction - 3.3
Philosophy - 2.5
Young Adult - 3.5

Clearly, I'm a fan of the classics and modern fiction, and fantasy and mystery aren't as much my cup of tea. Some of them I liked (e.g. Harry Potter!), but most weren't really my top books, and a few I really disliked.

One more interesting tid-bit, and then I'll get to the Best of 2007 list. Amazon.com has this really cool feature called "Text Stats" on all books that have the "Search Inside" feature. If you haven't seen this, you should check it out. Here is an example from the last book I read, The Prince and Pauper, by Mark Twain. In text stats they tell you things like how "readable" a books is, how complex the words in it are, and how many words or characters are in it. They also tell you how many words per dollar, so you know if you're getting good value! :) Anyway, the average length of the books I read this year was 93,642 words, which is longer than about 70% of all the books in Amazon. My longest book was The Three Musketeers, at 228,000 words. The shortest? Seedfolks, with only 11,478 words. For the statistically minded, the correlation between length of books and the number of stars I gave it is only 0.104, which means that I slightly preferred longer books to shorter ones, but not by much.

The other text stat that I looked at was readability. Readability is an index that tells what grade level would be required to understand the book. Of the books I read, the average grade level was 7.25, so an eighth-grader could understand most of what I read. I'm a little bit disappointed in that, because I feel like the books I read aren't the easiest ones out there, but what can you do? If it makes any difference, Jenn and I think the grade levels are a bit low. For instance, a 5th grader might understand all of the words in Their Eyes Were Watching God, but I really don't think they'd get the idea of the book at all. At any rate, the hardest book I read was The Great Bridge, which is rated at grade 11.4. The easiest was Their Eyes Were Watching God, at 4.3. The correlation between readability and number of stars here was even smaller: 0.08. That means that the difficulty of the book basically had no impact on how much I liked it.

Okay, on to the list! Of the books I read, only three got 5 stars, so there is no surprise that they would be my top three from this year (links are to my reviews of these books, genre in parentheses):

My Antonia (Classic), My Name is Asher Lev (Classic), These is My Words (Modern)

I would highly recommend any of these books to anyone. They all have different strong points, but all of them really changed the way I tried to live my life this year in a positive way.

I also picked the top book in each genre, not counting the above top 3 books (given that the genre had more than 1 book in it!):

Classic: For Whom the Bell Tolls (barely beats out The Three Musketeers)
Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Memoir: A Moveable Feast
Modern: The Kite Runner
Mystery: The Big Sleep
Non-fiction: The Great Bridge

Last and least, what was the worst book of the year? The Harlequin Tea Set, by Agatha Christie. I really like Christie, but this is just not her best book. This is one of the few this year that I didn't actually finish it was so bad.

I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts in the comments section of this post! Here's to another year of good literature!