EZ Wealth and Money

Almost 2011?! We’re Still Working on 2009
posted by Patrick on December 08, 2010

The end of the year is nearly upon us. Here in the US, the weather is getting cooler (yes, even in California), the days are getting shorter, and the holiday season is underway. One sign the season has begun is the deluge of year-end, best-of lists. The New York Times has released its 10 Best Books of 2010, and the Goodreads Choice Awards are up and running, already having received over 64,000 votes.

One of my favorite end of the year series is The Millions Year in Reading. I like it because it focuses on the best books people read in 2010, regardless of when they were published. After all, not everyone reads only the latest, newest books. Many of us are still working our way through the hot books of 2000, let alone the bestsellers from 2010. In fact, books are unique, in that a reader in 2010 might finish Eat Pray Love, a bestseller from 2006, one day and begin Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813, the next.

With that in mind, we thought it might be fun to look at when the books people enjoyed in 2010 were published. This is a graph that shows the number of reviews posted on Goodreads in 2010 sorted by the publication date of the book being reviewed:

As you can see, Goodreads users read more books from 2009 than from 2010, with books from the past decade being quite a bit more popular than books from the decades preceding it. A few interesting notes:

• More people read a book from 2003 this year than a book from 2004. I believe this is because The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003 and continues to be one of the more popular books on the site.
• Books from 1985 were more widely read in 2010 than any other year in the 80s.
• There’s a sizeable falloff in readership from 2005 to the previous years. I suspect that’s because Twilight was published in 2005 and continues to be very popular.

And just for kicks, take a look at the long tail of books read in 2010:

You can see that it generally follows the same pattern as the more recent years, with books from the 1960s and 1970s being more popular than books from earlier in the century, and so on, but the data is much noisier.

How do your reading habits stack up against the rest of the site? Do you tend to read newer books or do you stick to the classics?

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Article source: http://www.newsisfree.com/click/i,536209462,40387,40387,rss/