2011 a Year in Review

I get a kick out of stats.  I'm a huge baseball fan and I've been playing fantasy baseball for almost twenty years.  I find the ability to condense subjective actions into objective terms very satisfying.  It's really hard to do this with reading, but with a year's worth of data points, I figured there might be something interesting in all of it.  The result was some fun information about what I read this year:

• 90 books
• 42,287 pages 
• 52 published in 2011
• 3 will be published in 2012
• 65 are part of a series
• 40 were provided by the publisher
• I read more books published by Hachette (16) and its various imprints than any other – in this case all 16 were from Orbit. 
• The next closest were Random House (15), Pyr (12), Night Shade (11), Macmillan (10),  Penguin (8), and Angry Robot (6).  (I feel good about the distribution as I try to dip into all the major imprints.)
• 2 are short story collections
• 21 are written by female authors
• 2 are written by persons of unknown gender
• 23 are what I consider science fiction
• 43 are what I consider epic, high, or second world fantasy
• 9 are what I consider dystopian, ecopunk, or post-apocalyptic
• 4 have no clear sub-genre
• 3 are what I consider urban fantasy
• 3 are what I consider magical realism
• 3 are what I consider steampunk
  2 are graphic novels
• I wrote 118 posts.
• 75 of those posts were reviews
• I conducted 8 Interviews.
• There have been approximately 25,000 site visits this year (not counting RSS), which is a number I'm rather proud of as a first year blog.

• Goodreads, the Westeros Forums and Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Book Review are the top referring sites (other than Google,Twitter, and Facebook).
• My review of Jane Yolan's graphic novel, The Last Dragon was the most popular post of the year, until New Years Eve when my post calling Pyr the best eBook press in the business passed it.

All told this has been a wonderful year of reconnecting with my life long passion for reading.  Almost everything I read this year was what I consider genre, specifically science fiction and fantasy.  As I move into 2012 I look forward to branching out a bit more into some crime fiction and maybe a few more literary novels.  Then again, maybe not... I love my genre.  We'll see.

Regardless, thank you to everyone that visited the blog last year.  I started with 187 page hits in April and last month I had over 6,000.  I'd love to believe that it's because of my well thought out reviews and rapier like wit, but I can't help but give credit to a few people who early on promoted my blog and helped propel me into the community consciousness.  Thank you to Aidan Moher from A Dribble of Ink, Nethspace, Mad Hatter Review, Paul Weimer, Stefan from Civilian Reader, Jared from Pornokitsch, Bryce from Only the Best SF&F, all the other Twitteratti, and the authors out there who contributed their beautiful imagination.

Here's to an even better 2012.