Today marks the completion of 30 years of keeping track of the list of books I’ve read. Yesterday, I finished my 84th book of 2025, which also happened to be my 1,500th book since I began keeping my list. The book was C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

I began the keeping the list on January 1, 1996, while on a visit to my grandparent’s in New York. I’ve kept it, in one form or another, ever since, both on paper and online.

I’ll admit to sneaking in a few short books toward the end, in order to cross the 1,500 book mark, but that is balanced by the many overly long books I read earlier in the year. (The year began with the one-two punch of Brandon Sanderson’s titanic Wind and Truth and Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend.) And today, to balance things further, I began reading The New York Times Book of the Dead: 320 Obituaries of Extraordinary People, a massive book that will likely take me the better part of a week to get through.

Today, I am celebrating my milestone, and looking ahead, hoping that over the course of the next 30 years I’ll add another 2,500 books to the list (the extra thousand because I’ll be retired more than two-thirds of that time).

Coming soon: my favorite reads of 2025. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

— Bonita Springs, Florida