Tag: lists

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 obituary and then recounted some of the brief interactions he’d had with the Churchill. I’d read William Manchester’s 3-volume biography of Churchill 8 years ago, and it impressed me. I was particularly moved by a passage about the death of Marigold Churchill, his daughter. I was reminded that I’d always wanted to read Churchill’s World War II memoir, the full version of which fill six volumes. I scratched the word “Churchill” on my list.

Shirer also mentions Thucydidies in his memoir, and that reminded me that I’ve wanted to read The History of the Peloponnesian War. In my Field Notes notebook, I wrote “Thucydides.”

Thucydides got me thinking about ancient histories. Hadn’t I picked up a copy of Herodotus’s Histories? “Herodotus” went on the list.

In the chapters discussing his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I recently read, Shirer mentions that in length, it is almost as long as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That’s another history I’ve wanted to read for a long time. I scratched “Decline and Fall” on my list.

The chapter I was listening to ended, and I decided to walk the rest of the way home in silence. I thought about the things we needed to do before our road trip down to Florida two days hence. One thing the those semi-annual trips to Florida meant was 4 days of driving–two down and two back–during which I could spend 8+ hours each day listening to audiobooks. What books would I want to listen to?

There was that new biography of Harry S. Truman that had come out, The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953 by Jeffrey Frank. I scribbled “Truman” on my list. And there was that cleverly titled book, The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz. I wrote “Joy of x” on my list.

I glanced up at the sky. It was a slate gray, overcast and gloomy. For some reason I thought of the moon, and that in turn reminded me that I’d seen a new book come out by Fred Haise, an astronaut on Apollo 13. As someone who has consumed dozens of books on the space program, and especially Apollo, I decided that this would make a good read for our trip. I jotted “Fred Haise” on the list.

My mind drifted back to my recent reading, which contained a lot of World War II. I’d read John Toland’s The Rising Sun, and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer knew a lot of people, especially journalists, and I thougt about a passage he mentioned about John Hersey, author of Hiroshima. Hadn’t I picked up that book while I was reading Toland? “Hiroshima” went on my list. Of course, Shirer was a journalist, and I once thought about being a journalist–even going so far as to take a minor in the subject. Was there another journalist I could read about?

I pulled out my phone and scanned the list of books I’d recently obtained. Among them was Carl Bernstein’s Chasing History. “Bernstein” went on my list.

That was 9 books. I felt like I needed one more for an even ten. Right there below Bernstein’s book was another book I had recently acquired, Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn. Since the baseball season was about to start, I added “Baseball book” to the list. Here then, is the page from my Field Notes notebook containing a list of books to read.

This is a good list. I may not get to all of these books right away, or in this order. The butterfly effect of reading is unpredictable. But it’s a useful list to have going into our trip down to Florida.

ETA (4/27/2022): Since writing this post I’ve read the Truman biography, and The Joy of x. I also read another biography of FDR (not on the list above) and a biography of George Marshall. And I am, at the moment, almost finished with Carl Bernstein’s memoir, Chasing History.

Written on April 6, 2022.

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 Harry in that scene. I know the feeling. Each book I read spawns more books to read. And those books spawn more books. This continues in an endless doubling, tripling, quadrupling that has been growing increasingly doubtful of my ability to read every book ever written.

At various times, my to-be-read list can have anywhere from dozens to scores of books on it, each one of which is a butterfly’s flap to who knows how many other books to read.

This was illustrated to me in a stark way this afternoon, after I began playing around with the Mind-Map plug-in to Obsidian, my new favorite text editor. I was trying to see how my reading had progressed–and how Mount To-Be-Read had grown–since the weekend, just a few days ago.

I picked the New York Times Book Review as my starting point. (The Washington Post and a few other lists may have been involved as well.) From this I started listing out the books that interested me and that I ultimately read. From there, I began listing books I came across in those books that interested me and that I either noted on my list, or read. From there… well, you get the picture.

This formed a simple outline in my text file, and with a few keystrokes, I’d turned it into a mind-map:

Since Sunday, I’ve read 3 of the books on the mind-map (Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman, In Praise of Wasting Time also by Alan Lightman, and When Einstein Walked with Godel by Jim Holt). I’ve also nearly finished (as in I will finish it this evening.) The three books that I have finished spawned eight other books that have since been added to the mountain that is my to-be-read list. If we go with 2.67 new books per book I read, those eight newly added books will spawn 21 more books to add. Those 21 books will spawn 56 additional books.

You get the idea. I’m reminded of poor Ali Sard, in Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?. Ali is the one who had to mow grass in his uncle’s back yard, quick-growing grass:

The faster he mows it, the faster he grows it.

The faster I read, the more I fall behind.

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 over 25 years. For those curious, here is graphical breakdown of those years:

For those unfamiliar with my list, I keep it using a few simple rules:

1. Only a book that I finish gets on the list. Unfinished books don’t show up.
2. I don’t rank books, but a book that I would read again, or recommend, I’ll make bold on the list.
3. Re-reading a book counts as a finished book. Thus, the list is a list of all books I’ve finished, even those read multiple times. It is not a list of distinct titles.
4. What constitutes a book? I use my judgement. There are a few short books (#789 The Testament of Mary is one. But I also counted the full issues of Astounding that I read for my Vacation in the Golden Age as books since they were of equivalent length.)

I finished the very first book on my list, From Earth to Heaven by Isaac Asimov, on January 13, 1996. I was in New York at the time, on vacation. I can no longer recall what possessed me to start keeping a list. It is possible that I had already come across Eric W. Leuliette’s list of what he’s read since 1974. In any case, I managed to keep the list going in various forms and mediums. Twenty five years later, I finished my 1,000th book. The canonical list has, for some time now, resided in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook. Here’s the first page with entries from 1996, and the most recent pages leading up to and including my 1,000th book:

Sometimes I’ll add some additional notes in the notebook that don’t appear on any of the other forms of my list.

So, it took me 25 years to finish 1,000 books. That’s somewhat deceptive, however. From 1996-2012, I read either paper or the occasional e-book. In that time, I completed about 500 books. That’s about 16 years or about 31 books per year, on average. In early 2013, however, I decided to give audiobooks a try as a way of allowing myself to get more reading done. Since 2013, I’ve read an additional 500 books, so that’s 500 books in 7 years or about 71 books per year on average. My page has been increasing!

In 2017, I decided to see how much I really could read, given the freedom audiobooks provided, and the fact that I had slowly been increasing the speed at which I listen to audiobooks. (Today, I usually listen to a book at somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75x normal speed, depending on the narrator). I set a record in 2017, reading 58 books that year. But that record didn’t last long. In 2018 I read 130 books; in 2019, 113 books. So far in 2020, I’m on pace to read 110. Indeed, I sort of sprinted to the 1,000th book milestone. At the beginning of May I’d read 983 books. That means I read an additional 17 books (including 2 books that were over 1,000 pages each) in the first 23 days of the month. It is, by far, a record-breaking month for me, and one that I am not likely to repeat for some time.

Given the pace I’ve set for the last 3 years, I’d predict, assuming no significant changes, that I’ll finish my 2,000th book in July 2029, a little more than 9 years from now. What took me 25 years to do the first time, should be much quicker the second time.

The books that I read run the gamut of the Dewey Decimal System. While I haven’t looked recently, I think nonfiction outpaces fiction about 60/40. In the last 3 years, it’s probably more like 70/30.

Why read so much, and why list it out? Well, I’ve said elsewhere how I look at my reading as my real education. I learned to read in grade school; I learned to think critically in high school; I learned to learn in college. Once college was over, i was finally prepared to learn–and then had to enter the workforce. So reading is my way of learning. The list acts a reminder of what I’ve read (and what I’ve learned), but also a kind of literary autobiography. I can look at the list and for nearly any book on it, I can recall where I was and what was happening in my life when I read it.

And what about before the list? I’ve often wished I started my list much earlier. I was 24 years old when I started it and 2 years out of college. Looking back over that time, and thinking about books I read in college, and high school, books I read in grade school. Books I got from Weekly Reader and checked out of the library, children’s books that I read on my own or with help from my parents, I’d estimate the total to be not more than 500 books, and probably somewhat less than that.

When I finished the final words of Will Durant’s The Reformation on Saturday, I was sitting out on the deck, enjoying sunshine. I had a quiet, private moment of achievement. Then I started on the next book. I jumped from the middle ages in Europe to the present achievements in physics with Brian Greene’s latest, Until the End of Time, which I’ll like finish today and mark down as book #1,001.

I occasionally get questions about my reading and my list. If you have any, feel free to drop them in the comments below. I’ll do my best to answer them.