†Includes highlights, bookmarks and comments.

The ancient Greek maxium to ‘know thyself’ becomes much easier with data. But data on one’s self is suprisingly hard to come by. To make one small inroad into fixing this, I’ve gone about extracting all the annotations from my Kindle e-reader. This lets me see not just my highlights, bookmarks and comments but also when they were made. Plotting these by the time of day they were created (see chart) gives a retrospective of my reading life.

My weekdays look to be quite regimented, at least during the daytime. The noticeable peaks are for commuting and lunch breaks, filled almost exclusively by news reading. My evenings are more leisurely: with more spread-out reading of both news and books.

By contrast, weekends are dominated by books rather than news, with reading spead over more hours and with more gentle starts to the day. The practice resumes in the evening after a day of activity. Rarely does my reading strech past eleven, regardless of the day. All the better to rest and return afresh tomorrow.