Books

These pages are all about the books I've read. In 1985 I started recording and rating the books I read, perhaps to remind myself not to reread some forgettable trash, or perhaps to honour my first '10', The Lord of the Rings.

I've kept it going more or less continually since then, first on paper, then on Access, and now, more usefully, with a MySQL database. No obsessive compulsive comments please.

You can do all the things the statistician part of me finds exciting - rank books and authors, view average scores for a particular month etc. Use the menu options at the top. I've included a few of the more interesting options below and to the right as a 'front page'. If you don't find them exciting, hit that back button now.

Top authors (at least 2 books)

Avg	Author	No. Books
9.76	J.R.R Tolkien	25
9.50	John Boyd	2
8.86	David Zindell	7
8.83	Philip Jose Farmer	6
8.75	Stephen Donaldson	4
8.50	Nicholas Mosley	2
8.50	Leonard Q. Ross	2
8.25	David Eddings	20
8.25	Philip Pullman	4
8.25	Charles Dickens	4
8.14	Raymond E. Feist	7
8.00	Hermann Hesse	6
8.00	"Margaret, Tracy" "Weis, Hickman"	6
8.00	Robert M. Pirsig	3
8.00	Vladimir Nabokov	3
8.00	Barry Miles	3
8.00	Tatamkhulu Afrika	3
8.00	Robert Holdstock	2
8.00	Kazuo Ishiguro	2
8.00	Thomas More	2

Top authors (quantity)

Avg	Author	No. Books
5.87	Various	30
9.76	J.R.R Tolkien	25
7.64	Ursula K. Le Guin	25
8.25	David Eddings	20
6.45	Tom Sharpe	11
7.40	Frank Herbert	10
6.89	Isaac Asimov	9
6.56	Robert Heinlein	9
6.38	Mongane Wally Serote	8
8.86	David Zindell	7
8.14	Raymond E. Feist	7
6.86	Kim Stanley Robinson	7
6.71	Jack Kerouac	7
6.00	William Shakespeare	7
5.00	L. Ron Hubbard	7
8.83	Philip Jose Farmer	6
8.00	Hermann Hesse	6
8.00	"Margaret, Tracy" "Weis, Hickman"	6
7.67	Ben Okri	6
7.17	A.A. Attanasio	6

20 most recent books

Title	Author	Score	Date read
When We Were Orphans	Kazuo Ishiguro	8	2012/1
Guns, Germs and Steel	Jared Diamond	7	2012/1
Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic	Osho	5	2012/1
The Griqua's Apprentice	Antoinette Pienaar	4	2012/1
A Monk Swimming	Malachy McCourt	5	2012/1
Joy	Osho	8	2012/1
Blind Faith	Ben Elton	4	2011/12
Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	5	2011/12
Flyleaf	Finuala Dowling	7	2011/11
The Return of the King	J.R.R Tolkien	10	2011/11
The Death if Ivan Ilyich	Leo Tolstoy	9	2011/11
Googled: The End of the World as We Know It	Ken Auletta	4	2011/10
The Two Towers	J.R.R Tolkien	10	2011/10
The Fellowship of the Ring	J.R.R Tolkien	10	2011/9
Three Letter Plague	Jonny Steinberg	8	2011/8
Eastern Standard Tribe	Cory Doctorow	5	2011/7
Sons of the Moon	Henry Shukman	4	2011/7
Charles Bukowski	Barry Miles	7	2011/7
The White Castle	Orhan Pamuk	6	2011/7
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ	Philip Pullman	6	2011/7

20 random books

Title	Author	Score	Date read
The Pseudo people	Various	6	1988/9
Fingerprints of the gods	Graham Hancock	7	2001/2
A Rock and a Hard Place	Anthony Godby Johnson	6	1995/7
"Through a glass, clearly"	Isaac Asimov	7	1992/7
Luciano's Luck	Jack Higgins	5	1993/7
"PHI 108F: Moral and Political Values, First quarter 1994"	Various	6	1994/4
Dragonlance Legends 2	"Margaret, Tracy" "Weis, Hickman"	8	1988/2
inward moon outward sun	Shabbir Banoobhai	6	2002/4
A Star Called Henry	Roddy Doyle	7	2008/4
The Soul of the Ape	Eugene Marais	6	2003/6
Belinda	Anne Rice	6	2002/12
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism	D.T. Suzuki	5	1994/12
An Unpopular War	JH Thompson	7	2007/12
Summer Grammar	Ken Barns	5	2005/5
Father Frank	Paul Burke	6	2003/1
Cloud Dwellers of the Himalayas	Windsor "Charlton, and Time"	7	1993/2
Possession	A.S. Byatt	8	1997/11
The Cancer Years	Lynne Bryer	6	2005/2
The Soft Book of Martial Arts	Unsure	5	1997/4
Dragonlance Chronicles 1	"Margaret, Tracy" "Weis, Hickman"	8	1987/7