A quick look at the books I read this year, rated from 1-5 and divided into fiction and non-fiction. Twenty-two books? That’s not nearly enough, I’d say. It would be nice to double that number in 2011. It looks like I also read more fiction than usual. You can see that the fiction winner was an easy pick from almost everyone’s list. I loved the entire Millennium trilogy. For non-fiction I rated Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything highest.

On a related but geekier note, the map above was created using Tinderbox. I add new book titles in an outline throughout the year and rate them from 1 to 5. Tonight I opened the outline in a Tinderbox map view, created a “Book” prototype and added a “bar” pattern based on the rating, which is where the green bar graph effect comes from. Then I dragged each book’s note onto adornments, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. I then added summary notes which count the books in each category. For a few minutes’ work I get dynamic totals, rating bars and a nice visual of the past year’s reading list.