As I was compiling this year’s Book Club end of year considerations, I decided to add to some of our tabulating since starting the club. Next April will be out 10th anniversary and so it seems like time for reflection.
Looking at the data over time gives us a better sense of who likes whose recommendations. To look at this I created a quick cube.
What do we learn? Well most of us do rate our own recommendations relatively generously. But we also learn that MH favours recommendations from BC, JW favours BM’s recommendations, SD likes DK’s recommendations, JOD likes those from FOS and MH, FOS likes those from JW, BM likes JOD’s, SD likes those from RM and that is reciprocated. There’s actually some fairly significant trends there.
Likewise over time we also can extract our Top Ten Books of All-Time…drum roll please:
Not unexpectedly our top monthly scored all time best read was Alexander Hamilton a non-fiction one and we tend to favour these over our fiction reads, nonetheless there is a good mix here. When looking at the I can also note that our top monthly read id not end up as our year end book of the year, but 3 of the other did.
So what about looking at specific genre. Well, our top 10 Non Fiction reads over the past ten years (when we actually scored them – we may have done so in the first few years but records were not kept ;-( – But since we did…
Again, and this is interesting to me – we rate non-fiction higher than fiction and yet here with our top ten non-fiction reads of all time, only one went on to be our book of the year – Erebus by Michael Palin.
Similarly here are our worst rated non-fiction reads:
I will note tow things here. Our worst non-fiction have substantially higher ratings than our worst fiction and more interestingly, our most all come from the past two years. We are either reading worse books or simply selecting badly.
Our best fiction over the past ten years are:
Here as I alluded to earlier, 4 of these top rated when on to be books of the year for us and amongst these top ten they actually score higher than the top 10 non-fiction reads. There are of course some badly rated fiction reads as well and as noted when we don’t like a read we seem to find that really reflected in the overall ratings. As a result the average scores for bad fiction read are much lower than those for our less favoured non-fcition ones.
Thankfully these less liked reads are more spread out over time than our non-fiction reads and in point of fact, so are our best fiction reads. There is at least some consistency in our fiction choices over time, where our non-fiction are just not passing muster.
I will add to this over time I am sure but in the tabulating mood I thought I would take a broader look at our data history. There for your inspection.