I'm Addicted to Series Books More Than I Knew

If you take a look at the book market, you notice there are a lot of books that are part of a series. For myself, I tend to shy away from as many of them as I can. A lot of the premises tend to be the same, and certain genres have started to annoy me with the ridiculousness of their similarities to each other and other book series already out there. So I honestly avoid a few of them like the plague.

However, I decided to take a look into how many of them I am not only into at the moment but also am interested in. My first stop was my bookshelf. I was… surprised… by the results. But what I own is not everything I’ve read or plan to read. I had to dig deeper.

And dig deeper I did. (Say that three times fast.)

I went through my Goodreads series shelf, alphabetically by author, and began to chart different things. What I discovered was, highly exasperating. My results were quite insane. I am going to share them with you.

Bear in mind, these are just approximate numbers/percentages. It took me hours (over three separate days) of compiling the data and staring at a screen and remembering which check marks I made where. It is very likely I missed a few books or possibly double check marked a couple times. So, like I said, approximate, but, it’s still close enough. *

~*~

TOTAL OF SERIES **: 173

DIFFERENT AUTHORS: 144

SEPARATE BOOKS *** : 684

TOTAL OF SERIES I OWN: 60

SEPARATE BOOKS I OWN: 128

~ 87% YOUNG ADULT ~ 5% ADULT ~ 8% CHILDRENS ~

~ 32% READ ~ 68% HAVEN’T READ ~

~ 9% FINISHED ~ 15% WILL NOT CONTINUE ~

~ 76% TO BE FINISHED/STARTED ~

~ 20% INDIE ~ 80% TRADITIONAL ~

~ 61% PARANORMAL & DYSTOPIAN ~
~ 39% CONTEMPORARY ~

~ 42% STARTED ~ 58% NOT STARTED ~

~ 35% OWNED ~ 65% NOT OWNED ~

~ 19% OWNED ~ 81% NOT OWNED ~

~ 54% OWNED ~ 46% TO BE PURCHASED ~

~ 41% READ ~ 59% UNREAD ~

~*~

It makes me truly realize how far behind I am. And how many series I really, REALLY need to get to. I would like to have the percentages to at least half of the series started, also more series completed. It just seems so ridiculous how many series I have taken on.

Ah, the life of an avid book reader.

Not that I suggest calculating the perilous evil of the above for any of you, but where do you think you stand? Are you diligent about finishing series that you’ve started or do you start so many that you barely have enough time to read the next book when it comes out? Or do you try to read more standalones because series books drive you nuts to keep up with?

I would love to hear your thoughts!
 

~Jessica

* For the sake of making it look neat and orderly, I have adjusted the percentages to whole numbers instead of decimals.
** Including ones I have started, finished, won’t finish, and haven’t started yet.
*** Not including ones from the childhood series I am no longer reading (i.e. series with hundreds of books like The Baby Sitter’s Club, Sweet Valley Twins, ETC. which really throw the percentages way off base)

PS: For the sake of clarity as to the reasons why I subjected myself to the above, I decided to make a pie chart for that as well.

Note: All pie charts in this post were made on this website. Check it out, it was actually fun. ;)