So, I sat down to compile the 2019 stats the other day anticipating a week and a half of drudgery. Drudgery I would get some degree of nerd pleasure out of, but still drudgery. Only to discover that – none of my XML formula’s (that I use to harvest data from this website, which I then turn into the CBR database) worked. So I pulled up the home page, and find that everything looks different. Uh oh.
After verifying my code strings, and making a few changes – I realize that everything is now far, far easier to format. My job just got substantially easier!
When I started this database (I think I started building it four years ago), I was manually inputting all the review information (title, author, date, rating, reviewer, genres, etc) from the website into an Excel file. Gradually, I taught myself some rudimentary coding (like, literally enough to do this one job) so that I could automate the harvesting process. I then used Excel formulas to re-format everything. My job went from manual updates every day to being able to do weeks worth of reviews in a couple hours, to being able to do months worth of reviews in a fraction of the time.
All of this is an unintended consequence of website design – but it’s appreciated nonetheless.
Anyway. On with the stats!
Monthly review totals (total for 2019):
January – 515 (416)
February – 436 (316)
March – 394 (355)
April – 377 (380)
May – 429 (398)
June – 394 (377)
July – 490 (334)
August – 536 (384)
September – 454 (359)
October – 397 (305)
November – 257 (365)
December – 670 (403)
Most popular books:
1. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (20 reviews, 3.9 average)
2. Becoming by Michelle Obama (17 reviews, 4.6 average)
t-3. 99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne (13 reviews, 3.3 average)
t-3 Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (13 reviews, 4.5 average)
t-5. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (12 reviews, 3.2 average)
t-5. Normal People by Sally Rooney (12 reviews, 4.0 average)
t-7. Severance by Ling Ma (10 reviews, 3.7 average)
t-7. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (10 reviews, 3.7 average)
t-7. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (10 reviews, 3.7 average)
t-10. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley by John Carreyrou (9 reviews, 4.6 average)
t-10. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (9 reviews, 4.1 average)
Most popular authors:
1. Stephen King (54 reviews)
2. Agatha Christie (39 reviews)
3. Rainbow Rowell (35 reviews)
4. Taylor Jenkins Reid (32 reviews)
5. CLAMP (28 reviews)
t-6. JK Rowling (25 reviews)
t-6. Laura Lippman (25 reviews)
t-8. Arthur Conan Doyle (23 reviews)
t-8. Lois McMaster Bujold (23 reviews)
10. Tana French (19 reviews)
Popular genres:
Fiction: 3,516 (65.7%)
Non-Fiction: 916 (7.1% of fiction)
Fantasy: 830 (15.5%)
Children: 586 (11.0%)
Romance: 577 (10.8%)
Mystery: 705 (13.2%)
Science Fiction: 391 (7.3%)
Young Adult: 564 (10.5%)
Biography/Memoir: 307 (33.5% of nonfiction)
Graphic Novel: 326 (6.1%)
Top 10 reviewers:
1. vel veeter (730) – An easy record!
2. BlackRaven (550)
3. classic (331)
4. badkittyuno (261)
5. narfna (162)
6. Jake (140)
7. Caitlin_D (121)
8. Jen K (109)
9. Malin (106)
10. lowercasesee (105)
CBR Database:
30,309 reviews*
17,002 individual books reviewed
Annual review totals (CBR2-11):
2010. 1,881
2011. 2,335
2012. 3,138
2013. 3,574
2014. 3,061
2015. 3,837
2016. 3,447
2017. 4,146
2018. 4,392
2019. 5,349
Annual participant totals:
2010. 95 (15 cannonballs)
2011. 95 (22)
2012. 141 (33)
2013. 148 (31)
2014. 136 (28)
2015. 109 (31)
2016. 122 (30)
2017. 141 (25)
2018. 125 (19)
2019. 135 (33)
Top 20 Reviewers of All Time: (total reviews; ranking last year)
1. vel veeter (1,737; 4th)
2. badkittyuno (1,261; 2nd)
3. Malin (1,235; 1st)
4. narfna (1,117; 3rd)
5. BlackRaven (1,038; 20th)
6. Jen K (802; 6th)
7. bonnie (743; 5th)
8. Caitlin_D (630; 8th)
9. Sophia (612; 7th)
10. faintingviolet (529; 10th)
11. Prisco (494; 13th)
12. scootsa1000 (490; 12th)
13. alwaysanswerb (485; 9th)
14. ASKReviews (472; 14th)
15. ElCicco (430; 17th)
16. Mrs. Julien (430; 11th)
17. Classic (421)
18. emmalita (418; 19th)
19. Valyruh (364; 15th)
20. Travis_J_Smith (353; 16th)
Just outside the top 20: is Caitlin (335), The Chancellor (308), ingres77 (297), yesknopemaybe (295), Halbs (281), CoffeeShopReader (273), Lisa Bee (269), ardaigle (259), melanir (258), and kfishgirl (254)
*My tentative user totals for CBR1-9 show that more than 35k reviews have been written by the community to help raise money to fight cancer. I’ve catalogued roughly 85% of our reviews.
***My review totals may differ slightly from the “official” numbers due to errors I made in updating my data, or errors users make in countering their reviews.