Reading rate

At the end of last year, I saw a couple of people posting online saying they had read 150 books during the course of the year. 150! I'd read... *tot*tot*tot* thirteen.

Well, I've always said I was a slow reader for a bibliophile; but it occurred to me that maybe last year wasn't representative; after all, having a child born was fairly disruptive to my established patterns. So I went back over my reading log to find out, and the result was a little surprising.

There are a few expected correlations, which I have marked on the graph; but there are other things I expected to see affect the graph which did not: the start of my first job, the start and end of my sole previous long-term relationship; and I had to struggle to work out the causes of some of the observed features, some of which still elude me. (Why did I read so few books in 2012? I moved to Berlin for two months, but that shouldn't have dented the yearly total so badly.)

( View graph )