01 Jan 2026 » 5 min read about Reading & Books
I read 84 books in 2025, including my 1,500th book since I started keeping my list in 1996. I aim to read 100 books this year, but longer books, and a busier life kept me from that goal this time around. As usual, my reading was all over the map, from the fantasy of Brandon…
11 Mar 2023 » 1 min read about Reading & Books
As readers know, I have kept a list of books I have read since 1996. (As of this writing, there are 1,241 books on the list.) Last spring, I tried to estimate how many books I read before I kept my list. I have been thinking about it more and more, and over the last…
15 Nov 2022 » 2 min read about Blog & Site Meta
Recently, I have been working on simplifying my notes in Obsidian1. One of the things I have wanted to do for a while is make the list of books I’ve read since 1996 available in simple way that is easy to maintain, but extensible, so that I can eventually include notes about books I’ve read.…
27 Apr 2022 » 3 min read
Today I jotted down a list of books to read. I think it serves as a good, real-world example of how the butterfly effect of reading works on me. It started on my afternoon walk. I was listening to the final volume of William L. Shirer’s memoir, A Native’s Return and Shirer mentioned Winston Churchill’s…
13 Oct 2021 » 2 min read about lists
With the postseason underway, and I nearly finished with The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski, I got to thinking about my favorite baseball books. I suspect that The Baseball 100 will jump toward the top–if not the top–of the list. But what are my favorites right now? My list of books I’ve read since 1996…
17 Sep 2021 » 3 min read about Blog & Site Meta
Yesterday I introduced a beta version of my new reading list–everything I have read since 1996–hosted here on the blog as opposed to in GitHub where I’ve been keeping it the last several years. If you’ve been checking out the page, you may have noticed some changes in the last few hours. If you want…
16 Sep 2021 » 2 min read about Blog & Site Meta
ETA: I’ve made some additional enhancements since writing this post. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I would be adding some new features here on the blog. For one of those features, I’d planned to move the list of everything I’ve read since 1996 back here to the blog. I recently began that process…
20 Apr 2021 » 2 min read
I seem to be caught in the midst of one of my occasional reading phases. This is when I read many books on the same subject in a relatively short period of time. If I look through my reading list, I can find quite a few of these phases. They often last five or six…
11 Apr 2021 » 2 min read
I’m not what you’d call a particularly social butterfly. I have no trouble in a crowd and often have fun. But I also have days when I don’t feel social. Lately, I’ve been daydreaming of a post-Pandemic party. We have this huge deck which we haven’t really taken advantage of, as far as parties go,…
05 Mar 2021 » 2 min read about Reading & Books
Stephen King’s new book, Later came out on Tuesday, and by the time I closed my eyes Tuesday evening I had finished it. It was a great book and I figured I’d list some spoiler-free things I liked about the book in case any one else was thinking of giving it a try. It was…
18 Feb 2021 » 2 min read
There is a scene in one of the Harry Potter films where Harry and his friends end up in a treasure vault which has been boobie-trapped with a “Gemino Curse,” a variant of the Doubling Charm. Each thing touched, instantly doubles. Touch those things and they double. This continues without end. I have sympathy for…
26 May 2020 » 4 min read
On Saturday, May 23, I finished reading The Reformation, Will Durant’s 1,000 page book on, well, the reformation in Europe. There was a nice symmetry to the length being about 1,000 pages since this was also the 1,000th book I finished since I started keeping a list in January 1996. That is a span of…