Random Comments Stats So Far

There's a meme going around on the book blogs I follow about the 2010 stats so far (I've used Ken's version but there are a bunch of others). I generally do these kinds of things, I'll tell you about 2010 when the year is (almost) done, not because five months, fourteen days and 17 hours of it have already passed. Having reached 100 reviews last week I thought it would be nice to look back on those however, so I am doing slightly modified version.

The 100 reviews consists of 86 novels, 5 omnibus editions, 1 short story, 7 collections/anthologies of short fiction and 1 novella. 90 of these were written between July 4th 2009 and June 11th 2010. I cheated 10 times and moved older pieces to this blog. Once I decide I like an author I tend to return to their work. Kim Stanley Robinson and Alastair Reynolds are currently in the lead, each with 6 reviews, followed by a number of authors with 4.

Of these 100 works, 23 were written by women, 71 by men and 6 contained work by both men and women. I guess I'm still a bit biassed there although part of this seems to be that the men I read seem to be more prolific. The 23 books by women I read had 18 different authors (some more than one), the 71 books by men had 36 authors (again, some more than one). Or maybe I don't return to female authors as much as the men. Bit of both probably. No idea about people of colour but I'm pretty certain the authors are overwhelmingly Caucasian.

I read 10 works in Dutch, of which three were translations from German and 7 original Dutch language works. The other 90 were in English, of these only one was a translation, in this case from Russian. In total these works had 45,880 pages. The shortest being a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, 10 pages, the longest is Toll of the Hounds by Steven Erikson with 1295 (the mass market paperback edition, it may not actually be the longest in word count).

Publishers:
AW Bruna: 1
Ace: 1
Angry Robot: 2
Apex: 1
Baen: 4
Ballentine Books: 2
Bantam: 6
Berkley Medallion Books: 1
Books of Fantasy: 1
Corgi books: 1
De Bezige Bij: 1
Del Rey: 4
Doubleday: 2
Dover: 1
Dutton: 1
Fairwood Press: 1
Gollancz: 10
Grafton: 1
Grand Central Publishing: 1
Het Verschijnsel: 1
Kramat: 1
Little, Brown and Company: 2
Luitingh: 4
NEL: 1
Night Shade Books: 2
Orb: 6
Orbit: 4
Pan: 1
Penguin: 2
PM Press: 1
Pocket Books: 1
Pyr: 3
Rainbow Pockets: 1
Roc: 2
Solaris: 1
Tor: 19
Voyager: 4

That adds up to 99. I had a look at an Edgar Allen Poe story a while back which, being free of copyright, is widely available as E-book on the web. I guess Tor and Gollancz are the big winners. That is without getting into the whole which imprint belongs to whom thing of course. I must admit I lost track of that a long time ago.

Year:
<1900: 2
1900-1959: 1
1960-1969: 4
1970-1979: 4
1980-1989: 6
1990-1999: 8
2000: 4
2001: 3
2002: 1
2003: 5
2004: 3
2005: 1
2006: 7
2007: 5
2008: 12
2009: 21
2010: 13

Large emphasis on the last few years. I don't think a book blogger can escape that entirely. The picture is slightly skewed though. I read four Poul Anderson collections that contain work dating as far back as the 1950s but have only recently been published in this form. The same goes for a Frederik Pohl collection which spans something like five decades.

Most popular reviews:

01. Dust of Dreams - Steven Erikson
02. The Gathering Storm - Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson
03. Under Heaven - Guy Gavriel Kay
04. The Lucky Strike - Kim Stanley Robinson
05. Servant of the Underworld - Aliette de Bodard
06. Shadow's Edge - Brent Weeks
07. The Apex Book of World SF - Lavie Tidhar (ed.)
08. Blackout - Connie Willis
09. Shine - Jetse de Vries (ed.)
10. Dragon Haven - Robin Hobb

I guess epic fantasy still rules. The Lucky Strike is the odd one out. I gets an insane number of search engine hits for some reason. The others are either very popular books or the reviews were linked on author/editor blogs.

Hmm, I guess that's about it. Anything else you'd like to know?