A Year of Reading

I love to read, but when someone asks me what I like to read, I often draw a blank. It feels like I read a wide range of books because I usually take recommendations from friends and family. I also generally say I like science fiction the best but realized I was unsure of the last science fiction book I read.

As a full-time student with a part-time job, I rarely get to read as much as I like, so this analysis helped me get a fun, comprehensive view of my habits.

Final front of “A Year of Reading” visualization card

Final back of “A Year of Reading” visualization card

Data Gathering

I use the Good Reads app to track what I’m reading, which has the added benefit of telling me when I started and finished books. I used this to see the books I read in the past 365 days and then counted (roughly) the weeks it took me to complete each one. Much of the information was inherent to me, such as how much I liked it, why I read it, and where the physical book ended up after I read it.

I started by putting the information into a spreadsheet to see what I was working with. Then, I color-coded sections that were harder to comprehend at a glance, like the number of pages and the number of weeks to read.

Laying out my information like this made me realize that the most common page length was in the 600 range and that the most common amount of time to read was two and four weeks. Color coding made me realize that I wanted to emphasize certain aspects more than others, like which books I liked or disliked and how long it took me to read them.

Visualization

Next, I began ideating ways to visualize the information. I wrote out each subtopic and the possible category each book fell into and then sketched ways to communicate it.

Results

From my draft, I drew the final visualization. Each subcategory is represented as follows:

Concentric circles show the page range in hundreds
Time to read moves left to right horizontally along the card
Genres are sorted by color
Why I read it indicated by a vertical or horizontal line through the circles
Most to least favorites are ranked from top to bottom vertically along the card,
An ‘x’ in the middle indicates whether I have read anything else by that author
Symbols around the edge of the circles to show where the physical book ended up