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Another poll. This one's on reading habits, and for no better reason than because I'm shamelessly curious.

For the purposes of this poll, I'm counting physical books, audiobooks and ebooks of the type you would read in an ebook reader. I'm not counting stuff you read on the web, not because I don't think it's 'real' writing but because I think there's considerably less deliberateness -- one of the beautiful things about the Internet, to me, is that you can spend thirty minutes clicking around and wind up reading about quantum physics or the history of cheese without really realizing how you got there. Which is awesome! But doesn't really say much about what you prefer to read.

EDIT: And I'm counting manga and Western graphic novels that have been collected into books. Basically, as

meganbmoore put it, if it has a spine, I count it.

[Poll #1167420]

EDIT: I meant to mention manga and graphic novels under Fiction, and Politics under Non-Fiction, and then I goofed and didn't. Whoops.

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My option for simultaneous reads wasn't there. I read two at a time: one (relatively) big book at home and one (relatively) small/light book while walking around.

Interesting!

When I was a teenager, I had three books at any given time: one that I read in bed, that stayed upstairs in my bedroom; one that I read in the living room/downstairs, that stayed on the coffee table; and one that I read at school, that stayed in my locker and usually came from the school library anyway.

Same. Sometimes books are too bulky/heavy/large to carry on the bus or pack in a bag so I'll start a lighter book for that purpose.

Similarly sometimes I'll have one lighter plot book and a denser book going at the same time because one requires too much concentration for certain locations.

I'll never forget in undergrad when I was waiting around for the rest of my class to show up to the van loading zone for a field trip (film production class going to a production company and an production-equipment rental company), and I was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, hardcover, without the dust jacket. My professor looked at me (and I guess to him, I had my nose stuck in a perfectly gimongous book) and said, "Getting a little light reading in, Amber?" I blinked and replied, in a tone that implied that I considered nothing to be lighter reading, "It's Harry Potter!"

Except, of course, for the physical weight of the book. ^_^

Yes, me too. I like having a book with me on public transit, but I can only concentrate so well, and I often am carrying my laptop, etc., with me, so I want the book to be lighter in many respects.

I'm wondering if you counted manga. (I tend to count anything with a nive, solid spine that I was required to part with money for.)

Yes, and I actually meant to give it a tickybox of its own (though of course it can also fit under other genre labels), but I goofed and forgot.

I just finished reading my way through the FMA manga (up to what's out in the US, at least), and I definitely think it counts.

FMA is definately one of the best. I put it off for years because a large part of the fandom is so obnoxious and all the marketting when it first came stateside was catered to the "loud brat fighting things" crowd, but I finally found a few sane fans a while back and started reading the manga, then started reading scanslations when some of the events of vol 15 were recounted to me.

I just counted manga while I was voting.

I put off watching the anime for a long time for much the same reason -- just wound up watching it for the first time a little more than a year ago -- but found that I liked it quite a lot once I did. (Of course, stumbling over it a good year or two after it was The New Hot Thing probably helped with the degree of obnoxious fandom....)

Then I put off reading the manga because of the number of people who told me 'oh, you liked the anime, well the manga is so much better!', which tends to be an argument that doesn't sit well with me if I really liked the anime.

But I'm glad I did, finally. (And having a huge chunk of Hawkeye backstory in there certainly did not hurt. She pushes all of my Tough Female Character buttons with a big hammer.)

Well, I pretty much always prefer the manga(there are exceptions) no matter how much I may love the anime. The FMA fandom, though, is preetty bad in that regard, though, but a lot of the anime fans are actually the same. It's just something in an obnoxious fandom in general.

Hawkeye is easily my favorite character in both versions, and one of my favorites, period. FMA in general, though, does pretty good on the female character front. (I'm not overly fond of Mei/May, and while I like Rose in the manga, I don't care for her in the anime.)

I was sold on the series (anime and manga both) specifically with the promise of lots of good female characters -- and not only that but a variety of good female characters with different strengths, personalities, ages, etc.

It definitely lived up to expectations on that front, and I was glad to see yet more of them introduced in the manga. (And loved seeing more Hawkeye, because she's also my favorite.)

And I read manga and, to a lesser extent, Western graphic novels.

Counting manga might require me to increase that to about 3 books a day... at least whenever there is some around to be read ;->

It averages out. I think I was going through 3-4 a day until we ran out of FMA.

I should find another series to start on.

I don't avoid poetry, but it never occurs to me to seek it out and so I don't end up reading much of it...

Me too, actually. Occasionally I will be reminded 'oh, poetry!' and then I'll go find some... but I don't go looking for it.

And most of my poetry-reading is of the stumbled-on-it-on-the-Internet variety.

I'm the same way with both poetry and non-fiction =P

"if it has a spine, I count it."

So i guess that means wikipedia and random webpages don't count for non-fiction? Well i'm boned then :)

Read my intro paragraph! I specifically disinclude web pages. ;)

Because they're often not deliberate reading choices in the way I mean; they're 'oh hey I followed a link that followed a link and here I am.' Which is different.

Er, yes, i somehow missed that, probably cause i was skimming the page really fast due to certain time limitations... :)

(reconstructing prior comment lost to 'trafficulty')

The 'how many books' question was difficult for me, since I tend to vary in reading AT ALL and not reading. When I'm not reading, well, I'm not reading. I'm doing other stuff. When I AM reading, like I was last week, I'll go through, what, 2 books a day? ;->

Yeah, I was figuring a monthly or even yearly average, because I'm the same way (though to a lesser degree). Some days I don't read anything, some days I plow through a half-dozen books. And it obviously depends on the books, too -- if I'm on a historical nonfiction kick and the books are all 300 pages of dense, I average lower than if I'm reading manga and young adult fantasy.

I tried to answer as if I have time to read (not-grad-school reading, that is), ever. Like Pava, though, I do oscillate, so the frequency choice is an average of how frequently I read when I have time to read as I choose.

I think the last thing I read before UCSB started up was S. King's Lisey's Story, which was very good. 'Course, for me it is hard for Monsieur King to go wrong (hence the trashy tickybox), although Cell was kind of a pile. An interesting pile with Real Characters, but really not very good.

Right now (as in, this week, simultaneously) I'm reading The Selfish Gene (I've never read it! Yay for being assigned something interesting and fun to read!), an evolutionary-psych text book, and a couple chapters from multivariate statistics books.

You forgot young-adult fic, although it's hard to disentangle that when it is also genre fic. I also like fantastical/magical realism, which isn't generic literature per se but isn't really fantasy per se either. I mean, maybe American Gods can be shoehorned into fantasy, but A Series of Unfortunate Events?

I actually left YA off on purpose, but only after a bit of consideration. I think it's mostly also categorizable into other genres -- the fantasy tropes of YA fantasy are much like the fantasy tropes of adult fantasy, and books flipflop between categories (Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn switches sections so often it's practically got spineburn, and a lot of modern urban fantasy is shelved in either or even both). But there are some YA subgenres that don't really have adult fic counterparts, so probably I should've included something for that. (One that springs immediately to mind is the Endless Bunch-of-Friends Series, a la Babysitter's Club or Saddle Club or Sweet Valley et cetera ad infinitum, and which doesn't have an adult counterpart that springs to mind except, sort of maybe chicklit -- and there are probably examples that are a bit less trashy, too.)

I do a lot of cross-genre and slipstream-type reading, too; ASOUE is notoriously hard to classify. (In my head it's 'steampunk,' actually, but that's too finegrained a category to fit in a list like this....)

(I would've made manga its own category if I had it to do over because it often does follow very different genre tropes than prose fantasy or romance... or at least, than prose fantasy or romance in this country. I have no idea how similar or dissimilar it is to Japanese prose fantasy or romance.)

I read much more poetry now that I subscribe to The Writer's Almanac. A poem in my inbox every day! But I never seek out physical books of poetry.

For the past six months or so, I've been a library bum. Which basically means that once a week or so, I head in and look at the new books aisle, and pick up anything that looks like fun. Which means I get things from Red Moon Rising to Wuthering High to Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. It's less that I do genre fiction or non-fiction, it's just that I like stuff that's interesting.

Can I still change my answers? I just realized that the last book I read was contemporary fiction.

Either way though, you made me realize that it's been a while since I _really_ enjoyed a book. I tend to get done and merely think "Oh, that was neat.".

If you count sub-genres of fantasy/SF i also read mystery, historical fiction and romance :)

And for reading multiple books at the same time "different categories" really means "different types of books." I'll usually have one paper book and one audio book going at the same time, and very occasionally there's also an ebook going at the same time as the other two. And i'll also very occasionally have two audiobooks going at the same time, but for some reason i never do two paper books at the same time.

I was just thinking this morning that I would love to see a similar survey to ask how often people stop reading a book partway through.

I should note I feel guilty about how little non-fiction I read. It's something I'm trying to work on, so hopefully in the future the number of checkboxes in the types of non-fiction section will increase :-)

Other: children's fiction.

Other: books on poker.

I guess that might qualify as "science" via mathematics.

I don't dislike poetry (well, don't dislike *all* poetry), but don't go out and hunt for it.

Like a couple of others, my reading frequency tends to vary. I guess I oscillate between video games and books, to some extent; if I'm wrapped up in some video game or another I'll do that in small chunks of time, but if not I'll read something.

To some extent I'll read in the same way I play video games, also, which is to say that being in the middle of more than one happens sometimes, and more than one of the same type happens occasionally (but generally leads to one of the two being set aside for a while).

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