2005 Reading Year in Review - Part 2: Rereads

Yesterday I blogged about how much I'd read last year, and how it compared to the previous years. Today I'm going into how many of those were first-time reads and how many were rereads.

I've always been fond of revisiting books, especially when real life gets complicated. Whenever I'm tired, sad, stressed out, very busy, I tend to grab for my comfort books and reread and reread. The number I have in my mind is that about 30% of what I read is rereads. That was pretty close in 2005, when it was 32%, but it has fluctuated:

2001 - 28%
2002 - 29%
2003 - 36%
2004 - 23%
2005 - 32%

If I look at the numbers for each month, it's like I can track my stress level and different events.

In March, for instance, a whopping 61% of my reads were rereads, though February and April ran close, with 42% and 46% respectively. In mid-April I had the defense of an academic paper I wrote, and I got the date only a couple of weeks before. It might have happened any time from mid-Februrary on, and though I *thought* I was pretty calm and ready for it, looking at these numbers, it seems not.

June and November were very much new-books months, with only 14% and 12% of my reads being rereads, respectively. In this case, it wasn't so much that I was zen calm, but that those were the months in which I received my M-Bags, so I was flooded with new books I really wanted to read.

To be continued...