One of the advantages of having a book database is that you can easily query statistical data in order to look at reading habits in a different way. It also allows for precision that would be extremely tedious otherwise.

After reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information I realized that my existing selection of charts are, while not worthless, not as informative or useful as I would like them to be. Many of them have chart junk, they rely too heavily on pie charts, they are not focused on data-ink maximization and in some cases the information could be just as easily displayed and understood in a table.  (I still think the charts have worth, so I want to keep them up, but I am also open to any suggestions for improvement.)

So, with that realization, I decided to try to make something that would be more interesting, offer more insight, and conform to the rules of building good data graphics that Visual Display lays out for us. Below is my first attempt. It shows, by genre, the average number of pages read for each entry in the database. Yellow diamonds are books I do not recommend, while blue squares are books that I do. The objects are slightly transparent to give a sense of density for when multiple books have a similar pages per day average.

Simple, yes, but I think there are some interesting things to draw from it. First of all, different genres lend themselves naturally to being read at different speeds (which is why this is broken out by genre). Juvenile fiction you can fly through compared to everything else on the list (except for the one comedy book I’ve read. Which may be an outlier, but it’s hard to say without reading other books in the genre). Also, though it is possible to read a book slowly that you are enjoying (and would recommend to others) it makes sense that we see ‘not recommended’ volumes falling near the bottom of the average pages per day for their respective genres.

Of course, since this is my database and my books, I could skew this to confirm or deny the theory that you read books you enjoy faster, but what’s the point? Why would I want to read a book I hate any faster than I already am? Or stop reading a book I love just to lower the pages per day? My reading time is limited as is, and I doubt I’m going to read more/less quickly just to alter my stats. Plus, this chart updates automatically with each new entry, so as the sample size increases, any outliers should become more obvious and easier to dismiss.

Anyone have any other ideas for what would make interesting graphical analysis when it comes to trends or tendencies when reading books?