I’ve been out of town, and busy with work, but I wanted to check-in briefly now that the year is half over. I set a goal this year of reading 100 books (down form the 130 I read last year). How do things stand? As I write this, I just finished my 59th book of…

Bookmarks are hard to find. At least, I am seeing fewer and fewer of them floating around. Of course, with so many books available in e-book form, it’s no wonder that there are fewer bookmarks. I like bookmarks, but often use anything but a bookmark to hold my place. The most frequent object I put…

I was looking at my reading stats the other day. I happened to make a table that presenting how many books I’ve read each month over the last 24-1/3 years, and noticed a few interesting things. I thought I’d share them here. My list goes back to 1996. The first year in which I read…

Sometimes, I spend an hour or so looking into the future. I skim lists of books that are “coming soon” to see if anything piques my interest. I keep a list of the ones that interest me, and this list is never completely empty. Even as “coming soon” becomes “coming now” I am looking ahead…

I read 9 books in April, for a total of 36 books so far in 2019. I managed to read 130 books in 2018, and my goal this year was for a more modest 100 books because some of the books I had in mind were longer than the average. So I am pretty pleased…

Every now and then I encounter a book that is particularly challenging. Yesterday, for instance, I finished reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. I probably first heard reference to this book through the science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. But its title has popped up a…

In the spring of 1994 while preparing to graduate from the University of California, Riverside, I read Isaac Asimov’s memoir, I. Asimov for the first time. I knew of Asimov, of course, but I had read very little of his writing at that point. After reading I. Asimov I began to read everything I could…

In fifth grade, we learned American history. I lived in New England at the time, and there was no better place to learn about the American Revolution. Upon a hill in my neighborhood was an old graveyard. It had a stone wall, and among the briers and brambles aging gravestones tilted this way and that.…

It seems as if my little experiment is working. Nearly 50 days ago, I made a goal of reading one magazine article a day as a way with keeping up with all of the magazines I subscribe to. The idea was that in a given month, there was a combined total of about 30 “feature”…

When it comes to book recommendations from friends and family, I’m a poor target. I’ve mentioned this before. No one has a better grasp on what I like to read besides me. Then there’s the butterfly effect of reading. Even if someone whose opinion I trust recommends a book that seems interesting, it might be…

Several good magazine articles in this week’s reading batch. Here’s what I managed to get through (and my effort to read an article a day has now stretched to 42 days as of yesterday.) 3/3/2019 – “Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” by Melinda Wenner Moyer, Scientific American, March 2019 3/4/2019 – “The Other Tool Users”…

I like to keep some curated reading lists handy for those times when I struggle with what to read next. The three lists I depend on most are: Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels Sports Illustrated’s 100 Best Sports Books Slowly, I am chipping away at these lists. But I…