Southend Big Readers : The Stories So Far...

I've recently signed up for a free account with a web site called Story Graph, which I came across whilst watching a discussion of Good Reads and the alternatives on YouTube. I have had it vaguely in mind for a long time to resurrect the code base for the big readers web site and try to fashion some dynamic graphical stats from our own database . It would certainly be an interesting exercise one day, perhaps, but to be honest it is not something I really feel I have the time or enthusiasm to tackle this year between other projects I'm working on in my free time (not to mention the actual book group reading!).

However, whilst I'm too lazy at the moment to work on my own site, I did think it might be fun to use Story Graph to spit out some static book group related "snap shot" graphs that could be interesting to members of the group. So I used our database to get the reading history from Southend Big Readers and added it into my Story Graph account as retrospective data. It's slightly artificial. I've imagined that each of the historic books we've read was notionally started the month before the meeting and finished on the month of the meeting itself which is not entirely true but good enough. Here are the results, based on a snapshot which goes up to the beginning of July 2024 and includes "all time" stats. It is possible to break the figures down by year as well, but I'm just going to put up the full figures on this little site.

I should add, in case it isn't obvious, that these images are screen shots and although they say you can click things to look at the details, you can't sadly, unless you are me and have access to the actual underlying story graph account.

David Worton : 13th June 2024  with graph updates at 23rd February 2025

The moods are the predominant ones voted for by members of the site for each book, so we appear to favour emotional, reflective and mysterious books apparently...

We apparently like slow paced books more than fast paced ones....

We're not afraid to tackle long books. I was surprised by the number of books with over 500 pages there...

Classics and literary fiction are at the top of the charts but a variety of genres...

The author count is still heavily influenced by the original top 100 book choices from the BBC list which we were reading for the first few years in the group and in particular the short children's books that produced many entries for their favourites (the BBC vote was pushed hard in schools). Interesting that Charles Dickens comes out on top though. I'd forgotten we'd read so many of his. Also worth noting that there are more authors where we have read three of their books than is shown on the chart. The web site graph just seems to pick a "random" three of those and there is a little pool of others that could be promoted to four choices (e.g. Ben Elton and Kirstin Hannah)

Lots to say about this graph which is possibly my favourite. The first group meeting was in August 2003 so that accounts for the slow start. To begin with, we were selecting one book a month from the BBC top 100 list and the only deviation from that strict formula was when we decided to lump together the small children's books by a single author (e.g. Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson) since they were very short and made more sense to discuss as a block. That  accounts for the bit of bumpiness in the blue line. Secret Santa only came into the picture much more recently after we finished the top 100 and that's when the blue line rises up.

Pages, is about the worst metric for deciding how long a book takes to read. Word count would be better and then there are reading scores for complexity which it is possible to assign to texts. Sadly, Story Graph doesn't have that (and I don't even have page counts in our big readers database, so I can't complain).  You'd think at least word count would be more readily available when computers are there to add these things up and all text is digitally available but it's not as easy to get that data as you might imagine. One day I might try and add word counts to our database where I can get them. Anyway, for a bit of fun, page counts are at least some indication of relative length of books. For anyone who thought 2023 was a tough year, here is the semi-objective evidence that it was our record! I thought 2024 might beat it by the end when I originally posted this graph in July 2024 but it didn't quite. The current update is as at the end of February 2025 so we can't make a judgement on how this year is going to work out yet...

I just added a few scores in, scaled to the rating out of five (which allows half stars) from a few of my own personal "over all" scores on the big readers site. This just shows I tend to award 7 points for lots of books with a scattering of higher and lower marks. Not very scientific to be honest!

The gently sloping line at the top shows we weren't reading books in the years before they were published, which is always a good reality check on the validity of the data! Interesting to see that we have increasingly tended to pick recently published books. That's partly because we've now had a long time to trawl through the older classics and partly I think, because by picking recent books we stand a better chance of getting something no-one has read which is sometimes a good thing.

And that's the last of the graphs. I may (or may not) update this from time to time but it will be an irregular thing if I do.

Last Update : Feb 2025