Twenty nine years of being a reader: 06/08/16

Today marks the close of my 29th year of being a serious reader. I mean serious in the sense of tracking what I read. Keeping lists. Wanting to remember what I've read and when I read it. Last year I shared the tale of my handwritten diaries. This year I'll look more at my goals and how those have evolved over time.

Twenty years into the list keeping (June 2008), I decided to see how I was fairing. I had already long since covered my goal of reading more than 1000 books. That happened in my senior year of college (1995) with The Polish Tradition by Paul Super. So decided to extrapolate at my then current rate of reading to see how far I could get assuming I live to be 100. The number I came up was 15706.

Not quite 30 years in, I'm now at 7635. As you can see, I'm more than 12 years ahead of my initial estimate. It's not that I'm doing nothing but reading. I also volunteer in my community, I paint, I do the usual things a parent does. Reading is there for the times when I'm not doing other things.

This last year I read 335 books, down a little from the year before but in keeping with my GoodReads goal of 300 books a year.

The year opened with me finishing a re-read of Are You There God, It's Me Margaret by Judy Bloom. You'll see from the review date, that it took me ten months from finishing to posting the review. My last book for this year is Kraken by Wendy Williams. So maybe I'll get Kraken reviewed by spring next year.

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