Dataviz: My Reads (2016)
2016 has been the year of my love to read revival. Thanks to GoodReads, R and Highcharts (wrapped by Highcharter) it is possible to visualize some interesting and beautiful data…
Year evolution
Let’s start simple with a global view of what happened during the year.
Total books
The following chart shows the cumulative sum of books, being the total 93.
Why is there such a rise in March? maybe because I had my Kindle Unlimited free 30-day trial on that days…
Total pages
The same can be done with the sum of pages.
The shape here is slightly different. Sure it will be interesting to put both in the same plot.
Pages per book
So, we have number of books and pages. Next natural question is about pages per book. Let’s calculate it and see all data together in one chart:
It is true that I read a lot of books in March but, as the pages per book average fall shows, they were very short.
Notable page average increment occurs in May (blame it on The Count of Monte Cristo) and in September. The last one is due to Patrick Rothfuss and his two wonderful books. By the way, that was the moment when my love of reading finally came to stay. Thank you, Patrick.
Analysis per month
If we see data divided by month, peaks become clearer.
Definitely, I read more on October and less (nothing!) on February, shame on me.
Histograms
They are a useful way to see how things are distributed. Let’s see some examples…
Books by number of pages
If we divide books by size, how many of them are there in each group?
There are 27 books with pages between 200 and 299 (it is the biggest bin) and there are only two books with more than 1100 pages.
Books by publication year
What about divide books by their publication year?
It is clear I read more modern books than classics.
Books by rating
Let’s take a look at the ratings (number of stars) I gave.
The most common rating I gave was 4 (to 42 books). The worst rating was 2 and it was given only in 9 cases and there were 8 books that, in my opinion, deserved the best rating.
Authors by number of books
This histogram divides authors by the number of books I read from them.
The last histogram says that I normally read books from different authors (73 cases), I read two books from the same author on 5 occasions and there are only two more cases in some of the others alternatives.
The author I read the most is Stephen King with six books. That is because I want to complete The Dark Tower series (and all the books connected with it!) before the movie is released.
Comparing books characteristics
Let’s face fiction vs nonfiction books, standalone vs series and author gender.
Surprisingly I read more nonfiction than fiction books, it’s usually the opposite. I read more standalone books than series and much more books written by male than by female authors. I did not know this until now. I will try to equilibrate this in the future.
Summary
Finally, I had some fun creating colorful charts that summarize my reads…
Heatmap
Here, in a scale from 0 to 100, darker colors indicate lower values and lighter colors indicate higher values. The following chart shows all the books in a glance.
Some highlights to be noted:
- The Count of Monte Cristo is by far the oldest and largest book (it has the “darkest year” and the “brightest pages”)
- To Kill a Mockingbird is by far the most rated book (with more than 3M ratings!).
- Patrick Rothfuss’ books are the best rated ones (with average ratings higher than 4.5)
- Bag of Bones by Stephen King is the book I liked much more than the community did. It is my five star book with the lowest average rating in GoodReads.
Scatterplot
Another easy way to see all 2016 reads is distributing them in a plot by ratings count (x-axis) and average rating (y-axis). Size is related to number of pages and color to publication year. Again, darker means older.
It is possible to zoom (click & drag) the zones with more density of circles to make it easier to see the books in them.
It is interesting to note that most of the books I read have average rating between 3.5 and 4.5.
As a curiosity, it seems that Hyperion by Dan Simmons and The Waste Lands by Stephen King are the most similar according to this plot. In fact, they both have about 4.2 average rating, 125K ratings count, near 500 pages and only 3 years of difference.
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