The past 100 reviews ...

       There are now 2800 reviews at the complete review -- and, just as every time I hit a new century mark, I offer a statistical breakdown of the past 100 reviews.

        - The last 100 reviews were posted over a span of 167 days -- an average of 4.2 per week

        - The average review was 742 words long; the longest 2278 (with 15 more at 1000 or more words)

        - As always, fiction dominated: 79 reviews were of novels, plus 7 of story-collections; only 3 works of poetry and 1 drama were reviewed

        - Books from 40 countries were reviewed (up from 33 for the previous 100) -- with twice as many books (14) by American authors as in the previous 100 (followed by 13 by French authors, 7 by UK authors, and 5 by Egyptian authors)

        - Books originally written in English and 25 other languages were reviewed, the most popular being:

• English: 22
• French: 18
• Spanish: 14
• Norwegian: 5
• Arabic: 4
• Italian: 4
• Japanese: 4

       See now also the updated language list, tracking the languages all books under review were originally written in.

        - Books were graded as follows:

• A+: 1
• A: 0
• A-: 5
• B+: 28
• B: 47
• B-: 13
• C+: 2
• (-): 4

        - Most books were fairly recent (remember though that I count year of initial publication -- not, for example, the year of the English translation), with 43 first published (in whatever language they were written in) in the past five years:

• 2011: 8
• 2010: 9
• 2009: 12
• 2008: 10
• 2007: 4

       Interestingly, more books from the 1970s were reviewed (11) than the 1980s (5) or 1990s (9). Only 3 books from the 1800s were reviewed, and only 2 from before 1800.

       And, yes, as usual male authors dominated: 83.5 of the books reviewed were authored by men. That did raise the historic average from 14.72 to 14.79 per cent but, yeah ... not too impressive.