Thursday 6 January 2011

Book shelf statistics

My book collection has gradually amounted over the years and is fairly large for someone my age. I think that, all together, it consists of about 250 titles. I do feel quite frustrated with myself these days because I seem to buy more books than I read whereas, a few years ago, the opposite was true - I read tremendous amounts.

The fun of having a more extensive collection is that you can compile pointless lists and statistics. Below are two lists are, based on my book collection.

Right now I am procrastinating and should be revising. (It's getting scary now; I am resitting this exam and have scarcely done anything for it... In all likelihood I will fail it again. Nevermind, here are the lists...)

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Most nationalities

This list was made by making a note of each author in my collection and from country that author is from. Later I tallied them all up and made this list. The fucking yankies were triumphant by a rather large margin.

What follows is a list of all the countries and, adjacent to them, the number of books in my collection.

Yes, the formatting is a bit dodgy, but that is because I'm inept with computers.

1. USA 55
2. UK 40
3. Argentina 28
4. France 23
5. Chile 13
6. Russia 12
7. Ireland 8
8. Italy 7
9. Mexico 5
10. Poland 4
10. Germany 4
10. Czech Republic 4
10. Japan 4
14. Uruguay 3
14. Perú 3
16. China 2
16. Austria 2
16. Spain 2
19. Colombia 1
19. Hungary 1
19. Portugal 1
19. Belgium 1

It may seem quite surprising that countries like Russia and Germany are lower in the list, but the works of those countries in my collection are more 'canonical' and 'respected' - Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, etc. - so it evens out. Also, some of the authors I put as being from countries they were born and grew up in and not what they later nationalised as later. For instance, I put Joseph Conrad as being from Poland, not England, Kafka I considered Czech and not German and I put Nabokov as being a Russian rather than an American writer. Yes, all this is, ultimately, meaningless and unimportant.

Most authors

This is a top 5 list of the most books I have by certain writers. This list is determined by the quantity of these authors on my shelf, not the quality of their writing or a list of favourites.

1. J. G. Ballard 19
2. Julio Cortázar 11
3. Paul Auster 9
4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 8
5. Jorge Luis Borges 7

1 comment:

Francisco Méndez S. said...

que casualidad que tengamos los mismos autores en la biblioteca saludos