happy quadricentennial to me

So as I coyly alluded to in the previous post, the appearance of an Anita Shreve book in this list often marks a key moment in its history, an anitaversary if you will, and this one is no exception, being the 400th book to appear in this list since The Weight Of Water almost exactly 18 years ago. I see that last time (Sea Glass was the 300th book) I provided some stats, so I'll update them here:

Milestone	Date	Days	Pages	Pages/Day
100	15th September 2010	1474	28361	19.24
200	2nd February 2015	1601	30761	19.21
300	16th September 2020	2053	31782	15.48
400	30th September 2024	1474	33460	22.70

• Note that this was the joint-quickest century on record, oddly occupying the exact same number of elapsed days as the first one. Note also, however, that each century has involved longer and longer books, on average anyway, and so the last hundred were read at the highest pages-per-day rate of all. Note also that the first ever book review was in a September (2006), and then three of the subsequent milestones (all the ones involving an Anita Shreve book, as it happens) also took place in September (2010, 2020 and 2024). Coincidence? OR IS IT??!!
• Longest book in the fourth hundred was The Pope's Rhinoceros at 753 pages; shortest was The Thirty-Nine Steps at 119 pages. 
• Number of distinct authors for each hundred in chronological order: 93, 88, 92, 93.
• Number of authors who were new to me (generally, not just among books reviewed here) for each hundred in chronological order: 40, 36, 42, 55. The fourth hundred was therefore by a comfortable margin the most adventurous in terms of trying new stuff, which is interesting, but which I'm not aware of having been a conscious decision.
• Male/female split for each hundred in chronological order: 75:25, 72:28, 80:20, 71:29. So the fourth hundred was the most female-author-heavy yet, but only by one and still with a male to female ratio of well over two to one.

The "most read authors" chart now looks like this:

Number of books	Author(s)
11	Iain (M) Banks
7	TC Boyle
6	Ian McEwan Russell Hoban William Boyd
5	William Gibson Jim Crace John le Carré
4	Lawrence Durrell Anita Shreve Beryl Bainbridge Robertson Davies Patricia Highsmith
3	Cormac McCarthy Stieg Larsson Hilary Mantel Alison Lurie Graham Swift Paul Theroux Anne Tyler Barbara Trapido Marilynne Robinson