300 Picture Books

At the beginning of the year, I signed up for a ‘book challenge’ to read 300 picture books in 2013. It was aimed more for picture book writers and wannabe writers, to look at around 6 books a week for inspiration, and the originator stopped updating their site in early February. However, when you have small children, reading 300 picture books doesn’t take as long as you’d think, and I took the challenge and ran with it…

I started to use Goodreads to track the books we read each week, missing some repeats here and there but more or less keeping track of the majority of books I read to MG and DG throughout the year. I left out books that weren’t on Goodreads (mainly TV-tie ins or things like Thomas the Tank Engine Books, Disney princess rubbish and so forth, and non-fiction books) and I took the challenge as 300 different picture books read.

Many of these books were read over and over and over again. Some days I’d read (for instance) Each Peach Pear Plum six or seven times; other days I’d read six or seven different books; some days if we were all tired I’d not read any books. I haven’t counted the books that MG has read (and she’s reading more and more of the bedtime stories to her little sister now, it’s lovely) or the ones Mr Chaos read. How many actual stories we’ve read in the first five months of this year, I don’t know, but it’s more than 300; maybe I should start reading chapter books!

One of the books I read on 1st January was We Love You, Hugless Douglas and it was one of the books I read on 31st May. The official 300th book on the Goodreads list was Hugless Douglas.

There should be 300 books showing below, any missing are due to my accidental editing:

And because I am very dull, here are some stats:

20% of the books came from our local library and another approx 20% were review copies from publishers. The remainder are ones we owned or bought this year. Roughly 20% of owned books were bought second-hand; only a handful were gifts from other people!

This graph shows how many new picture books were read cumulatively week-by week. As you can see, to start with most books were ‘new’ but as the weeks/months pass, more and more re-reads take over slowing down the total. If I add a linear trend line in, it predicts 700 books by the end of the year. This is skewed by the speed at the start of the year. I’ll guess somewhere between 400-500, assuming lots of library books borrowed. Although there are still huge sections of our (picture) book shelves unread so far this year…