I'm a PhD student. Although my field is not literature, this still means that I also read (and write!) a lot during my "full-time day job".

Like I responded to another comment, my reading rhythm varies significantly from one day to the other, I may read 20 or 200 pages in a day, and it depends heavily on the book itself as well. The motivation just comes from the pleasure I take from reading, and as a kind of "palliative" after reading more technical stuff in my work. Very few of the books that I read for pleasure are related to my field of study. Also, I'm curious about many different subjects outside my PhD, which helps in keeping it interesting.

About finding the time... That's a question I get a lot. The thing is, I don't watch much TV, I don't watch Netflix, and I don't have an Instagram or TikTok account. Instead, I use that time for reading and other things I enjoy, like reading (but also, for example, some video games). I'm not boasting at all about this, it's just a choice that I make, just like it's anyone's choice what they do with their free time.

I usually don't have a "reading list" for much longer than a couple of weeks, just a pile of "to read" books, and it shifts a lot depending on my mood.

Still, for next year, my plan is to get to know European literature a bit better. So, what I want to do is read at least one book from an author of each country in the European continent, published after 1900. I'm currently identifying the potential books, and suffice it to say, it's easier to find books for some countries than others...

It was fully done in Excel, yes. I explained how I did it in another response, which I post below:

I followed a simple process for making the vizualization. I had all the information about the books that I read on one Excel sheet. This was: book name, author, publishing year, publisher, language, number of pages. I would update this sheet regularly as the year passed. Then, I had one sheet where all the data was aggregated. Finally, on a third sheet, I built all the graphs and summaries mostly based on the aggregated data. I then just took a screenshot of that sheet.

Everything was done with the visualizations that are already built in Excel. For the per country, I used the "Maps" graph, and for the per publisher I used the "Treemap" graph. Then it was a bit of tinkering to get the visualizations to look like I wanted them to.

That's a big bummer... I'm lucky that the Amazon from Spain carries a lot of French books, otherwise, I'd be in a similar situation. I'd love to learn Spanish at a certain point, but for now, I want to keep improving my French!

I usually stick to more "literary" works, but I read a lot of sci fi this year. I wanted to get a good overview of the genre by reading a lot of the classics. The fact there's a collection like the "S.F. Masterworks" really helped in the process, a lot of the filtering was already done. I really recommend you check their books, if you're interested in the genre.

That's great! You should share your visualization too.

My labels for "fiction" are quite loose, and not rigorous at all. By "historical fiction", I generally mean novels published before 1900. "Modern fiction" generally refers to novels published between 1900 and 2000, and "Contemporary fiction", is anything after 2000.

All three of his novels are great. I laughed out loud several times while reading Amerika, because the humor, while strange, is very sharp.

I followed a simple process for making the vizualization. I had all the information about the books that I read on one Excel sheet. This was: book name, author, publishing year, publisher, language, number of pages. I would update this sheet regularly as the year passed. Then, I had one sheet where all the data was aggregated. Finally, on a third sheet, I built all the graphs and summaries mostly based on the aggregated data. I then just took a screenshot of that sheet.

I'd like to see your viz! Can you share it?

Yeah, Kafka's one of the greats. Sometime during the summer, I decided to read The Castle. Then I thought that I should (re-)read all of his fiction. I'll probably need to re-read The Castle at some point though...

Happy that my visualization inspired you. I'd like to see what you can come up with!

It varies, based on my mental availability and the size of the book. For example, the longest book I read this year was "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross, about 800 pages, took me about one month, because I was reading other stuff at the same time, and because it's one of those books you need to slowly absorb. On the other hand, I can read a 200 page book in a day, although that's not what I usually do.

I'm from Portugal, so Portuguese is my mother tongue. I've been learning English since I can remember so it's very natural for me. I started learning French seriously a couple of years ago, so nowadays I can also read it comfortably. Actually, I had the original objective of reading 12 books in French this year, and I'm quite proud to say I managed to go beyond that.

I get my books mainly from Amazon (English and French) and BookDepository (English), since they basically have everything in stock at all times. For Portuguese, I'll just go to a bookstore in the city where I live.

The visualization was fully done in Excel, and is based on my own data, built from information on the books that I read in 2022.