Walt at Random

Seems like this is the time people are posting their reading accomplishments for 2010–lists of books or at least counts of books read.

Which seems like a good idea.

But I don’t have one, because that’s one of many areas of my life that just aren’t that organized. I have a teeny-tiny Books database, but it’s just for authors and series that I either want to follow but not check out more than once, or maybe want to avoid having read one of them.

Maybe that would be a 2011 Resolution, if I was given to Resolutions: Keep track of the books I’ve read.

My guess is that I read roughly 50-52 books last year, but it could have been slightly lower than that. The basis for the guess:

• Livermore Public’s borrowing period is four weeks. I get three books at a time, so my goal for the year was, presumably, to read at least 39 books (13 four-week periods, three books each).
• I’ve almost always gone back after three weeks, not four, but “almost” may mean that I’ve only taken out, say, 16×3 books, not 17×3. I did renew one book during the year, but made up for that.
• I gave up on one book partway through. But I also read two books (other than my own) that didn’t come from the library.

Book equivalents? No idea. I currently take something like 22 magazines (18 subscriptions, four as a result of memberships), and that includes all three of the “major” science fiction magazines, two issues of which are at least the equivalent of a book–so those three alone account for 18 book-equivalents (actually, there are only 26 issues, but 10 of those are double issues, each of which has a book’s worth of content). The others aren’t quite as text-heavy.

Hmm. Worth keeping track of reading? Maybe. Maybe not: Laziness calls. Oh, if you care about the fiction/nonfiction breakdown, that’s easy: One-third nonfiction, one-third “genre fiction” (split between mysteries and SF), one-third “mainstream” fiction.

Incidentally, for anybody so bored that they’re still reading, the one time I gave up on a book (The Black Swan), it was because I found the author insufferable. Right now, I’m reading a nonfiction book where I disagree with the author on many counts and think he’s foolish on some–but he’s also engaging and writes reasonably well, so this one I’ll finish.

Enough idle posting. Back to reading other people’s online content…and working on The Next Big Essay.

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2011 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Books and publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.