Website Viewing Hits 3

So here's the viewing habits for the past month. It looks quite similar to last month, and given that it represents a wider scope of time, it's probably on a part with the usual totals. Dating personals and Web ads dropped off, it appears, in favor of business and search engines. Not sure why business showed up so high this time. I'll do another survey in a few weeks.

Books Read per Year

Apropos of last week's chart, I decided to look at how many books I read each year and what slice of them were by authors I'd never read before. Is it true I've read more in recent years? Is it true that I read more of the same authors earlier on than I do today? Let's see:

Indeed, my gut feeling appears largely to be true! The number of books has gone up--though it's descended again the last few years. And the books by authors I've never read has been the larger share in most recent years. But let's see how it works on a percentage basis each year.

Yep, this confirms, by percentage, what I had thought. The blue takes up less space overall in more recent years than it did in earlier ones.

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Vladimer Nabokov

Having charted my Vonnegut reading last week, I figured I should do that same for another writer who I've more consciously tried to read more of over the years and with whom I've done so throughout my life (as opposed to writers like Kerouac or Fante, who I read largely in my twenties and who I'm largely confined to rereading now, if I read anything at all).

Approximate Ages at Which I've Read Kurt Vonnegut

So I recently finished up God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that ranked as the favorite of an acquaintance of mine back in my early twenties. It's taken me twenty years to get to it. I don't know why. It's not that I'm not a Vonnegut fan. He wrote some good stuff. But I just haven't run out and read a lot of his fiction. As the chart below shows, I read him most in my early twenties.

There's a certain obviousness to his points and themes, but I don't know that that should make him someone a person outgrows. There's much to admire, including that voice that is very much his own--and certainly enough, I think, that it won't be ten more years before I return to him.

First and Second Date Activities

It would likely be hard to put together a list of such dates over the course of my life, since--even though I have never dated a lot--twenty years is a long time, and it's likely I've forgotten a date or two in doing this assessment. There's also the whole question of whether the activity was a date in the first place. I've tried hard, in the past couple of years, to ensure that what I'm doing is being read as a date so that I don't end up accidentally in the friend zone (unfortunately, so far, it hasn't done much good).

So here's what I did on memorable/remembered first dates:

Or to break it down another way by activities involved:

Here's what I did on memorable/remembered second dates:

Or to break it down a different way by activities involved:

It looks like dinner is the clear winner for first dates, and it is often a feature of second dates. Why does lunch play so small a role? I think it's that going to lunch, for me, is simply too rushed. Even if the idea is to keep a first date short so as not to prolong discomfort, because I rarely live close to where my dates live, lunch is hard to come by.

In fact, a number of my first dates involved things, stretching into longer hours, that most people would reserve for later dates, scared as they are that the first date will go badly. I've generally known the women somewhat by the time we go on the first date, I suppose, which may be one reason I haven't always felt compelled to keep the date short just in case, though I have on the two most recent dates I've gone on. Even when I don't know the gal that well, if I'm out on a date with her, it almost always seems to go fairly well--I'm entertaining and nonthreatening and only a little weird (and not in a creepy kind of way). After all, the date is about getting to know someone, and that for me is fun, even if it's not a match.

Another thing: dinner and a movie--looking back at that, those were mostly dates when I was far younger. I would no longer choose that as an option--I want to spend my date talking. After age twenty-one, it's easier to extend a night at a bar somewhere, which allows for more interaction than a movie would.