Moorcock, Dicks, women - and statistics! A thrilling look through my Goodreads list.

One thing I love about using Goodreads is that you can download your list of books as a spreadsheet. (Yes, this is going to get excitingly dull!) I’ve tried to make my Goodreads list as complete as possible; every so often I’ll turn up a few forgotten books, or notice some odd anomaly, but in general it gives a good picture of my reading. It includes fiction, non-fiction and books of comics (i.e. trade paperbacks and graphic novels), but not individual comic books.

Anyway, I downloaded a copy of my booklist and had a play around with it... I seem to have read about 2439 books so far, so my average has been about 64 a year since birth. I own 1261 that I haven’t read, I’ve left 100 unfinished (mostly anthologies and omnibuses), and I’m currently reading 6.

Narrowing the list down to the books I’ve read, I used the brilliant =UNIQUE function of Google Docs to produce a list of authors I’ve read. That information isn’t entirely reliable, in that the spreadsheet column I took the info from just lists the first listed author of each book. Also, using =COUNTIF to count how many books I’ve read by each of those authors, gives a total of 2302 books, so 137 books are getting mislaid somewhere. But never mind!

Those 2302 books are by 755 different authors, so my average is about 3.05 books per author. 665 of the authors I've read are male, 84 are female, 6 are unknown. Of those 2302 books, 2146 are by male authors, 143 by women, 13 by unknown.

So about 6.2% of the books I’ve read have been by women (very low, but actually a bit better than I’d expected), and 93% of the books I've read were by male authors. And on average I’ve read 3.23 books per male author (2146/665), but only 1.7 books per female author (143/84).

My top ten authors read are:

1. Michael Moorcock 61
2. Terrance Dicks 57
3. Grant Morrison 47
4. Alan Moore 44
= Jack Vance 44
6. Isaac Asimov 38
= Garth Ennis 38
8. Piers Anthony 36
9. Philip K. Dick 31
10. Robert A. Heinlein 27

Altogether I’ve read an amazing 423 books by those ten writers, accounting for a whopping 18.4% of my lifetime's reading. In fact, I've read more books by Moorcock, Dicks and Morrison (165) than by all the female writers of the world combined (143).

Comics writers are going to end up dominating that list, because they produce so many books: a year’s output for a comics writer can often produce half a dozen trade paperbacks. Excluding comics writers from the top ten gives:

1. Michael Moorcock 61
2. Terrance Dicks 57
3. Jack Vance 44
4. Isaac Asimov 38
5. Piers Anthony 36
6. Philip K. Dick 31
7. Robert A. Heinlein 27
8. Brian W. Aldiss 20
9. Philip José Farmer 19
10. Terry Pratchett 18

That’s a list which hasn’t changed much, except in the order of the names, for 15 or 20 years. The first female writer to appear on the list would be Diana Wynne Jones, currently at 11th.

No need to do a separate top ten for male writers, for obvious reasons. But here’s a top ten of female writers:

1. Diana Wynne Jones 17
2. Enid Blyton 12
3. J.K. Rowling 6
4. Andre Norton 5
= Barbara Kesel 5
6. Wendy Pini 4
7. Virginia Woolf 3
= Kate Orman 3
9. Colette 2
= Rumiko Takahashi (and ten other writers) 2

There must be some books missing - I’m sure I’ve read more than two books by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and where is Vera Southgate? - but that’s the sorry picture as it stands. As you can see I’ve yet to finish the seventh Harry Potter book!

A few other things I noticed from playing with the list...

The longest book I’ve read is Europe: a History by Norman Davies (1392pp), although I have to admit to browsing that one more than reading it from start to finish. The next longest was a comic, Bone: the One-Volume Edition (1332pp). The longest novel was Executive Decision by Tom Clancy (1296pp).

Looking at the list by character, I’ve read about 189 Doctor Who titles, 52 about Superman, 48 Batman, 28 John Constantine, 23 Judge Dredd, 13 Star Wars, 11 Star Trek, 9 Conan.

Sorting the list by publication date suggests that the oldest book I’ve read is The Epic of Gilgamesh, dated at -1300. Surprisingly, the data suggests that Andre Norton’s Plague Ship (one my favourite ever books) was published in the year 2. Maybe the Time Traders books were inspired by her own time travelling...