There’s a world where I didn’t read anything in 2021. Usually I keep very detailed records of books I’ve read—and bought—but ever since 2020, it’s been a little shoddy. Somehow, I have no records of reading a book in 2021. Not. A. Single. Book. Someone please surface evidence of me reading something in 2021, please.
Remember back in 2019 when I said “After last year’s debacle of twenty-two books read, I think it’s safe to say that I am no longer a reader.” Well friends, I am now officially no longer a reader. In total, it seems like I only read ten books between 2020-2022. I don’t even know how that’s possible but my guess it was video game related. Or just a simple lack of record keeping. The latter is possible because all ten of the books I jotted down from those years are hits, which seems nigh impossible. Here’s the list:
- A Phoenix First Must Burn, Patrice Caldwell
- Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
- Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
- Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte
- Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
- The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
- Lurkers, Sandi Tan
- Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong
- Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
- Severance, Ling Ma
More on some of these specific books another time but what this showed me was that I need to return to my book tracking ways. (Everything digital I did fell off in 2020—pandemic related maybe, but also wasn’t I just indoors for months and right in front of my computer?) Toward this end, I explored alternatives to Goodreads such as StoryGraph or LibraryThing but decided to just settle back in to the so-so Goodreads experience.
I updated all my books read since 2019—about sixty give or take—and in the process of exploring non-GR options, found out I could export a CSV of all my entries and get fun stats in spreadsheet form. Overall there’s 450+ books and I wanted to know the longest book I’d read and also the oldest book I’d read by publication date.
I can’t believe Lord of the Rings is the longest book here, but if Goodreads says it’s so, it must be so. There’s no way I would read a 1000+ page now. We read it for our first post-college book club so I’m guessing it was a lot of subway reading. I wonder how many hours of my life a thousand page book is nowadays. Also, I wondered how many books I’d read over the span of my entire life…a thousand? More if I add in childhood and textbooks?
Anyway, the “books by publication” year chart was less interesting than I would’ve thought. It’s got the usual suspects with only one fun entry, the last book I read in 2024, The Red House Mystery, which was published in 1922. I really need to get some more Chinese classics in there I guess. Oh, maybe brush up on the Bible? Wait, I took a class on the Brontes in college, where did those go? Well, whatever...
Pleasingly, I already have a 900+ page book queued up for 2025: Middlemarch! It was published in 1872 as well, allowing me the shot to crack both top ten lists. Upon completion of Middlemarch I'll retire from reading any such long tome, because that's just a lot of words, isn't it? Note: I learned about George Eliot from Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman's Life. Heilbrun quoted Virginia Woolf as saying Middlemarch was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
What I’m trying to say is: I want to be a book person again. Books are not a personality but why not? My friend Banshee and I trade long text chains about books and only books. She recently took a break from her job and picked up volunteering for a book store. “Yes. [I] feel like my life is all about books right now,” she wrote.
Yes, that’s exactly the vibe I’m heading into 2025 with. My life shall be books!!!
Toward that end, as previously stated, I am making the goal of reading forty fiction books this year. And with the help of my new Glocusent reading light--Wirecutter approved, of course--I’m going to make that number. In addition, my partner and I are going to update our reading and suggestions on our new Bookstagram @somewhatnovel. Or one day, BookTok! (Probably not.)
Another thing that’s happened since 2019 is that my eyesight has degraded to the point that I can’t read regular sized font anymore. A few years ago, my optometrist told me that if I get LASIK, the left eye would have to be made for reading and the right for nearsightedness. I scoffed, dismissing any need for an eye that can only look close up. "I'll just carry a magnifying glass!" Well, now I stand just a few years later, the text size on my phone cranked up to REALLY BIG and all my computer fonts at 16px and my browser shortcut ready to zoom in at any moment...
I guess you can always go back to reading, but it just won’t look the same.
