Tag: 2014

2014 Book Breakdown

Here is the breakdown of the 57 books I read in 2014. All the numbers below are how many books fell into that category.

Format

I was a little surprised by how few books I read on my Kindle. I really do prefer reading on it, but since I almost never buy books, I read in whatever format I can get them. If I were to actually spend money for a book (and had a format choice), then I would get them exclusively for my Kindle.

  • Paper Books: 29
  • Kindle/Electronic Books: 16
  • Audio Books: 12

Genre

I was able to tease out 8 major categories of books. I did have 1 book that overlapped categories. It was not strictly biographical, but it also was not what I would consider a plain history book. So the count adds up to 58 instead of the 57 that I read.

  • Communications/Business: 19
  • Religious: 12
  • Technology: 6
  • History: 5
  • Productivity: 5
  • No Category: 4
  • Fiction: 4
  • Biographical: 3

Months

  • December: 12
  • November: 8
  • 2 Months: 5
  • 3 Months: 4
  • 5 Months: 5

Ownership

  • Library: 31
  • Owned: 24
  • Borrowed: 2

Of the owned books, they broke down like this:

  • Free or given to me as a gift: 12
  • Purchased used: 9
  • Purchased new: 3

I guess you can see I don’t spend much for books even though I read quite a few. There are so many books that I already own that I have never read, I really shouldn’t spend so much time at the library. But it is so hard to resist the pull of the New Books shelf each week when we go.

We are members of 2 local libraries. The one we go to every Saturday is fairly well stocked, but seems so impersonal. Though we have been there most Saturdays for the last 3 years I still feel like we are walking into someone else’s library when we are there. I’ve never felt like the staff are friendly or personable. Their computer system has been in a constant upgrade process for 2 years and it almost never works as expected. I only remember asking for help finding a book one time and that was about 1 year ago. The lady pointed towards where the book should be. I had already looked and asked her if she could go help me look. She finally did. Though we did not find the book, it is still listed in the catalog as being on the shelf. I have told them twice that the book was missing, but they have not taken it out of their catalog or flagged it as being temporarily lost.

The library where I go during the week is in a small house. Almost too personal at about 1,200 square feet of total space (this includes stacks, offices and storage). I haven’t spent much time in there, but I know all the workers’ names and they act thrilled to help any patron try to find a book. I am excited that this during-the-week library is building a new 16,000 square foot building that will open in May of this year. That will be a more than a 10X size increase in the new building!

Over the next few days I will compile the groups of books and work on a few book reviews for you.

2014 Consumption — 2015 Creation

Today is January 1–a day typically known for goal setting and resolutions. For me I have been thinking about my 2015 goals for a couple of months. First let me tell you about 2014 (which I did not blog about my goals for the year). Then I will get into 2015’s goals.

2014 — A Year of Consumption

Some of the books I read in 2014
Some of the books I read in 2014

No, not a year of tuberculosis. That is a different kind of consumption than what I did in 2014. I made 2014 a year of reading. I know some people read a ton more books than I do; but for me, setting a goal is helpful to keep me reading. I did something similar in 2008 and 2009 when I had a goal of reading 800 pages a month. In 2008 the goal was an average for the year and 2009 was an attempt to not let any month drop below 800 pages.

For 2014 the goal was not a certain number of pages, but a certain number of books. I wanted to read 50 books for the year. My final total was 57 books. Total pages read was 13,275 (for an average of 1,106 pages a month).

I will go into much more analysis about the books in upcoming posts. Mainly I am breaking the analysis into smaller parts because of what it has to do with this year’s goals.

2015 — A Year of Creation

I have a big content creation goal for 2015. Of course I will still be reading through the year. I plan to write down each book I read (which I did better in 2014 than I have ever done before). It will be interesting to see if I actually read significantly less when I don’t have a specific goal.

Writing

Year of WritingThe bulk of my content creation will be in the form of writing. I plan to create at least 4 pieces of writing content per week. That will be spread over several websites. I have identified 8 places where I should be regularly creating content. That means that the 208 new pieces of writing won’t all be here. So it may not look like as much writing is going on if you just follow this one blog. This just happens to be the best place to talk about this and the place that can catch any random thoughts I have.

This is a total goal for the year and not necessarily a week-to-week or month-to-month goal. So if I don’t have 4 each week or 16 each month, I am allowing myself to catch up towards the end of the year. It is also possible that this goal is too meager. I will re-evaluate later and see if I need to increase the number as the year goes along. Based on the last couple of years, I don’t think this will be too low. I need to get back into more consistent writing.

Evaluation

Along with a writing goal, part of my creation will be evaluating my different websites. I want to seriously look at all the themes, plugins, functionality, and overall design of each one of my major websites. So each site will get an honest evaluation.

I want to standardize many of the plugins I use. Because I have built my various websites over the course of 15 years–with about 9 years focused on WordPress–I found the best plugin at the time for a particular job. But, that means that I am using about 4 different caching plugins and 3 different backup plugins (with some sites having no automatic backups at all). I want to unify my maintenance routine on the sites which will best be done by standardizing the way I work with each site.

Personal Goals

I have some other goals related to Bible study, health and ministry. Though I probably won’t post my Bible study goals explicitly, the fruit of those goals will show up on Genuine Leather Bible. BTW, in 2014 I was able to buy the .com domain for that website. I will probably keep the main content on .net, but now the .com will point traffic to the site. That has become, by far, my biggest source of traffic.

I had thought about having a minimum number of words that are needed to be considered a “piece of content,” but I never have problems writing too few words. I am tracking everything with the knowledge that if there is ever anything that is considered too short (300 words or less) those will be balanced out by the many blog posts and articles that will approach the 3,000 word mark throughout the year.

Happy 2015!