Because I clearly do not have enough to do at work, and because I spend much too little time in front of the computer, and because today is almost a landmark for my read every book project, I have spent several hours today analyzing my reading data.
Below, you can see the results of my analysis.
In the above chart you can see my cumulative and non-cumulative daily statistics. The dark green line indicates the cumulative items completed per day. The lime green line indicates the the items completed per day over the reporting period (based on my irregularly scheduled self-reports). The dark blue and light blue lines exclude DVDs, videos, CDs, and tapes from the report–thus reporting only cumulative books per day and books per day over the reporting period. The red and pink lines further exclude all childrens and young adult materials from the report and only report adult fiction and nonfiction.
I can see some interesting trends in my results. While my cumulative total items has remained relatively stable around 1.3, my individual total items has bounced up and down–getting as high as 3.8 items per day and as low as .72 items per day. However, the total books per day and total adult books per day have remained much more steady–both cummulatively and from reporting period to reporting period. This indicates to me that much of the variance in my library consumption from reporting period to reporting period is related to variance in multimedia consumption. (Of course, this inference is not foolproof, as I do not have individual breakdowns by media at each reporting period through the second year–thus it is equally likely that I just had up and down reading periods on a regular basis throughout year 2.)
The above pie chart breaks down my library consumption a little more clearly. As you can see, in the past 1050 days, about 76% of my library consumption has been of print media. 61% of total consumption is composed of books of decent size. (I am considering the following categories to include books of “decent size” adult fiction and non-fiction, young adult fiction, and juvenile fiction. Since most of the youth non-fiction, chapter books, first readers, and picture books fall under 40 pages, I am not considering them to be “decently sized” books.)
I did a quick calculation and came up with 868 books of decent size read since September 5, 2006–which comes out to about .83 per day. So my standard statement (that I read 1.25 books per day) is not technically true. Since September 5, 2006, I have consumed 1.25 library items per day. However, it would be most accurate for me to state that I read around .8 books per day–which is still nothing to sneeze at.
So, having done this analysis, I can rest easy tonight. I did not induce Dr. K to lie about how much I read at our internship graduation. I still qualify for groundhog status (digga, digga, digga). ;-)