I tend to read the same book for several days in a row before going to the next. I mostly switch because something super tense is happening in the first one and I need a reprieve. I'm definitely not reading multiple books in the same day!

So many! Octavia Butlers Patternist series was amazing. Also loved A Memory Called Empire and Ancillary Justice

My thought process: I wanted to color by genre, but I needed to group them into categories to reduce the number of colors. Prob not obvious, but the warm colors are fiction and cool colors are nonfiction. I pulled out the subgenres I read the most of and lumped the rest into broad buckets.

I did the genre selection myself—out of curiosity, what did you hate about it?

I read every night before bed! It's such an ingrained habit now I can't fall asleep without doing it.

I also don't watch much tv (ironically because I find it hard to sit still and focus), so that time goes to reading too

It definitely sacrifices clarity in favor of aesthetics, but I wanted to try out something completely different!

I get you, I was cautious about this viz for that exact reason. I do love looking at data art, but some of it really doesn't resonate with me because I can't understand what point is being made (and as a data journo that's my whole job lol)

I've done this exact analysis three years running and was getting bored of the same old traditional-ish visuals I'd been doing. I wanted to do something completely different to re-engage myself in the creative process.

I fiddled with a lot of "field of flowers" ideas using geom_bezier in ggplot to make curved "stems" showing the length of the books I read, and layered geom_points to make flowers colored to represent the genres. Everything I worked on in that vein felt like I was ripping off Valentina D'efilippo.

I randomly adding in a coord_polar to my plot and really liked the output. From there, I refined in ggplot (eg removing the flower heads) and gussied it up in Illustrator

I analyzed my wpm data a couple years ago and I tend to read 350-500wpm depending on subject/complexity. At an average of 300 words per Kindle page, 81 pages per hour equates to 402 wpm. (edit: google seems to suggest 400wpm is normal for lifelong/heavy readers)

Interesting question! I looked, and 9 were rereads, 5 of which were of Tana French books.
It's hard to define how many books I have going at once, but let's say it's the number of books on any given day that that a) I've started, b) I have yet to finish, and c) I do eventually finish.
By that definition, I have had anywhere between 1-6 "in progress", with a median of 2. But of course I do put down books for long periods of time, so I don't think those really count (tho I didn't exclude them)

It's a term that can be kind of pejorative for books that aren't literary fiction (literary fiction: think stuff that you read in English class/gets major awards/reviewed in big publications). In my case, that category is mostly made up of mysteries and historical fiction,

exactly, that's why I chose not to label it or anything... I was too lazy to re-export the plot sans width differences

yeah, I sized them by how much I liked the books (thin = not very much). That was hard to see, I thought, so I didn't bother to label it.

a bit of both

geom_bezier to get gently curving lines, and coord_polar to wrap them in a circle

thanks! I just played around with the data for a week or two, trying to come up with a more data art concept than straight data viz. This ended up being the best concept I popped out

I analyzed data pulled from my Kindle to make the visual. Analysis and chart done in R. I used illustrator to add gradients to the “plumes” and lay out the final viz.

I read 94 books last year, roughly split between fiction and nonfiction. More details about my 2022 reading here. At the bottom of this post I documented how I grab data from my Kindle.

I did the data analysis and mapping in R. My code and more context is here.

The data comes from the USDA