25 Years of Reading

This almost passed unnoticed, but when I was updating my master list of books I’ve read the other day, filling in the counts for December 2020, I realized that I have been keeping my list now for a full 25 years.

I took this data and put some totals together to look through:

A few observations:

• Wow, I’ve read 1,049 books over the last quarter century. That’s not too far shy of the goal that I originally set for myself back in 1996 of one book per week. (1,300 books over 25 years, so I got 80% of the way there.)
• I started using audiobooks in February 2013, and it is clear that from that point on, my reading picked up. I broke the 25 years down into 5-year segments and the two largest segments make up the most recent decade: 193 books between 2011-2015; 419 books between 2016-2020.
• The longest I’ve gone without finishing a book appears to be the last 4 months of 2007, when I apparently finished nothing.
• The last time I failed to finish at least one book in a month was way back in January 2015. (Although, I came close in December 2020 because I spent most of that month reading Brandon Sanderson’s massive Words of Radiance.)
• When I started keeping my list, it was to track my goal of reading 1 book per week–something that I failed to achieve for the first 17 years of my list. I finally hit (and exceeded) that mark for the first time in 2013.
• The most books I’ve read in one year is 130, back in 2018.
• The most books I’ve read in one month was 19 books back in May 2020.
• July appears to be the month I do the least amount of reading–or finish the fewest number of books. (I’ve read 72 books over the last 25 Julys).
• November appears to be the month when I manage to finish the most books (I’ve read 107 books over the last 25 Novembers)
• Seasonally, I read more in the colder months, less in the warmer months.

As you can see from the first image above, my notebook is already setup to track the numbers for the next 25 years.

One thing I plan to do this year is put together a new site for my reading list. I’ve been hosting it on Github for several years now, but I want something a little flashier, searchable, and easier to navigate. I’ll let you know when (and if) I get that completed.

(P.S.: This post is the first written on my new Mac mini.)