Opinion

What’s Your Reading Profile?

Jeff O'Neal

CEO and co-founder

Jeff O'Neal is the executive editor of Book Riot and Panels. He also co-hosts The Book Riot Podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @thejeffoneal.

It’s that time when folks start to list, chart, graph, rank, and otherwise organize the books they’ve read this year. This post started as another list of the best books of 2011, but as I thought about all the books I’ve read since January, I became less interested in what I could say about them and more interested in what they might say about me.

And of course, I had to compare this year to last year and then to the year before that and….well, you see how it went.

In the end, I wasn’t interested so much in the specific titles I read, but the kinds of titles I (apparently) am drawn to–not what I think I read or what I want to be reading or what I think I should read or even what I let on that I read.

When it comes right down to it, my reading is actually fairly predictable, falling into identifiable, albeit sometimes idiosyncratic categories (even though a one-year glance at authors and titles might make it seem more diverse than it actually is.)

So here’s my “Reading Profile”: a snapshot of the kinds of books I am likely to be reading in this year, or any other. Leave your breakdown in the comments and I’ll put a bunch of them into charts for a future post. (Be creative with your category names…and honest with yourself).