Self-improvement bootcamp
2020 · 31 booksNonfiction-heavy year: productivity, philosophy, and how-to energy. The shelf was still mostly advice.
Evolution
Taste isn’t a fixed point — it’s a trail. From 2020 to 2026 the shelf grew 74 points more fictional . Scroll the eras, then watch genres trade places in the river.
Eras
Named chapters in the reading life — click a year chip below to jump.
Classics binge
2021 · 39 booksThe pivot: fiction and classics take over. Chandler, Hemingway, and the long dead crowd the nightstand.
Wandering fiction
2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 53 booksShorter years, wider taste — fantasy arcs, literary experiments, and a slower, more selective pace.
The present tense
2025 · 2026 · 8 booksFewer books, thicker ones. Recent reads lean long and literary — quality over volume.
Year by year
Each row is a fingerprint: volume, fiction share, length, and what dominated.
- 2020 31 books3.79★ 26% fiction 302p median 5y lag
- 2021 39 books3.68★ 85% fiction 275p median 48y lag
- 2022 14 books3.92★ 71% fiction 244p median 12y lag
- 2023 16 books3.88★ 94% fiction 189p median 34y lag
- 2024 23 books3.75★ 65% fiction 265p median 30y lag
- 2025 6 books4.00★ 83% fiction 434p median 21y lag
- 2026 2 books2.75★ 100% fiction 481p median 24y lag
Genre river
Relative mix of your top genre tags each year (normalized so bands always fill the river — books can wear more than one tag).
- Fiction
- Classics
- Fantasy
- Science Fiction
- Young Adult
- Nonfiction
- Mystery
Author universe
Cumulative unique authors — how fast the cast of the shelf expands.
- 2020 27
- 2021 47
- 2022 55
- 2023 64
- 2024 82
- 2025 85
- 2026 86
Eras are interpretive labels on top of the same bookshelf data — not hard boundaries. The genre river normalizes overlapping tags within each year; thin years (e.g. 2026 so far) will look jumpy. Pair with Metamorphosis for a before/after cut, or Fossils for tastes that went extinct.