Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

• Number of books: 167
• Number of authors: 58
• Male to female ratio: 78 to 88
• Genre split: 28 SF, 88 fantasy, 36 crime, 11 horror

On the qualitative front, high points included:

• Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven; every bit as good as everyone says
• N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season; a superb start to what promises to be a really fascinating trilogy
• Django Wexler's The Thousand Names and its sequels in the Shadow Campaigns series; one of my favourite discoveries of the year
• Paul Cornell's The Witches of Lychford; note perfect and extremely enjoyable
• Emma Newman's Planetfall; a wonderful combination of an unreliable narrator and an almost impossible to comprehend situation

Of the year's debuts, here are a few that really stood out and left me eager to see what their authors do next:

• Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library; a fun, snarky steampunk fantasy that pushes all the right buttons
• Peter Newman's The Vagrant; a intriguing world, an extremely accomplished narrative style, and a story in which only one member of the quartet of leading characters is able to speak — in part because one of them is a goat.
• Fran Wilde's Updraft; a beautifully drawn world, a coming of age ritual, and the gradual discovery that the world isn't as simple and Manichaean as it seems

Dishonourable mentions? None! Because if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. And because I'm not really sure I read anything truly awful last year. There were a couple of things that didn't suit my temperament, a couple of things where the author didn't quite manage to deliver on their initial premise, and one case where I felt that the writer had lost interest in series resulting in a very minor entry, but otherwise the quality was consistently pretty high.

Which brings home three important points: firstly, that I read an awful lot; secondly, I'm actually pretty balanced in my selection of authors; and thirdly, my backlog of books to be written up is far worse than I thought!

ETA: Updated with the final totals for 2013:

Despite counting twice, I seem to have lost one of my male authors somewhere along the way. I can only think that I must have counted one of the James & Mendlesohn collaborations one way last time and the other way this...

( Complete, unexpurgated reading list for 2011 )

Excelsior!

Over the last 10 months, I've read 82 books of which 51% have been ebooks. This averages out at 1.9 books a week or one book every 4 days. It also means, according to my rough calculations, that I've read something in excess of 8.16 million words in the last 10 months which averages out at something like 26,000 words a day. According to LibraryThing, the most heavily used primary tags in my catalogue this year are: fantasy (44%); crime (30%); science fiction (12%); horror (6%); philosophy (4%).

For the curious, the report was generated by dumping my LibraryThing database out to a tab separated file and used a set of custom python classes to parse, summarise and format the data into a report. The word count estimates were generated using a simple heuristic that takes the number of pages from the LibraryThing publication data and multiplies it by an average number of words per page per format to generate a total for each work.