Reading Goals for 2019

I didn’t have a specific reading goal for 2018. That is, I didn’t say to myself, I am going to read 50 books this year. Way back when I started keeping my list of books in 1996, I did have a goal: Read one book per week. It seemed reasonable at the time, and yet I never managed to make that goal until 2013, when I read 54 books.

Setting a goal

Having a book count as a goal is tricky. Books vary in length. This year, for instance, the average length of books I read was 473 pages. But there is wide variation. The shortest book I read this year was The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, which came in at 96 pages. The longest book I read this year was The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, which exceed 1,300 pages. I read 16 books this year that I consider to be “long” book, each exceeding 700 pages. Such variation makes it difficult to set a specific number of books as a goal.

As most of the my reading comes through audiobook, I rely more on how much time I can spend listening to books each day. Audiobooks makes it easy to listen to books while doing other things: working out, commuting, doing chores around the house, waiting in line, watching your kid’s soccer or basketball practice. Audiobook turn out to be one of my best productivity tricks. Early in the year I set a target of 3-1/2 hours of listening time per day.

From that start, I looked at what the average length of a book I’ve read since I started listening to audiobooks in 2013. It turns out to be 453 pages, which translates into an average of 17 hours, 45 minutes of listening time per book. Well, knowing that, and with a target of 3-1/2 hours of listening time per day, I knew it would take me about 5 days on average to finish a book. And knowing that, I could make a reasonable estimate of how many books I could listen to in a year. That came out to about 73 books, far more than any previous year.

Adjusting the goal

At first, that number seemed completed unreasonable. In 22 previous years the best I’d ever done was last year when I finished 58 books. 73 books would be a 25% increase over last year.

Two things combined to change my outlook:

First, I found that I was regularly exceeding my daily goal of 3-1/2 hours of listening time. For instance, last month, I averaged 4-1/4 hours of listening per day. I keep a little heat map of this data, and here’s what it looks like for November:

Reading Heatmap

Second, over the last 5 years that I’ve listened to audiobooks, I’ve steadily increased the speed at which I listen. I started at 1x and after a long time, moved to 1.25x. Early this year, I moved to 1.5x. Then, this fall, when a new Audible app update introduced the 1.75x speed, I started listening at that speed. Each jump takes some getting used to initially. For the most part, these days, I listen to nonfiction at 1.75x and fiction at 1.5x. When I try to listen to a book at 1x these days, the narrator sounds as if they are on quaaludes.

This had a significant impact on how much I managed to read this year. At 1x speed and an average of 4 hours 15 minutes per day, I can get through 7 book in a month. By comparison, at 1.75x speed, I can get through almost 13 book in the same month. Over the course of an entire year, that’s 150 books! But as I didn’t make this change until more than halfway through the year, I adjusted my goal to something I still thought of as a stretch: 120 book for 2018.

The Goodreads Reading 2018 Reading Challenge

Goodreads has an annual reading challenge where you can set a goal and track your progress, along with that of your friends. So I went into Goodreads and set of goal of 120 books. It looked to be a lot more books than what I was seeing for many people. Indeed, it turns out that the average goal for the Goodreads challenge this year is 59 books. My goal of 120 books is double that. I figured I’d come close, but fall a few books short.

Then, over the weekend, this happened:

2018 Reading Challenge

I finished my 120th book in early December. It’s hard to believe, even with the evidence right there in front of me. And given that I’ve been averaging 14-15 books/month for the last few months, and that the second half of December I’ll be on vacation, I think it is safe to assume that I’ll finish 2018 in the neighborhood of 135 books.

Goals for 2019

So what is my goal for 2019? I’m tempted to set a goal of 148 books for 2019. That may seem like an odd number to pick, but there is some logic to it. Assuming I finish 14 more books this year, 148 books next year means that my last book of 2019 will be my 1,000th book since I started keeping my list in 1996.

Reading History

That is a stretch goal if ever there was one, but I think stretch goals are good, and it gives me something with extra meaning to aim for.

Anyone else have reading goals for 2019? Let me know in the comments.

And for those wondering about the best books I’ve read in 2018, I’ll have a post on that–in January. I don’t think it is fair to put out a “best of” list for 2018 before the year is over. Back in 2016 the best book I read that year was Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t read that book until the end of December. So look for my “best of” list in January.

Biblio Curiositas

Sitting on the sideline at my son’s basketball practice I was reminded of a mild malady from which I suffer: biblio curiositas. A medical dictionary might describe such an illness as a sudden, urgent desire to know what it is that person sitting next to me is reading. I’m paraphrasing, of course. Still, I find that when I see someone reading nearby, friend or stranger, I need to know what it is they are reading.

The mechanics of this can be tricky. Even if I know the person, they are often engrossed in the book (making me all the more curious) and I am loathe to interrupt and break the spell. I know all too well the magic of that spell and can become surly when someone breaks it for me. Instead, I will glance over and see if I can make out the cover.

This works about 50% of the time. After all, if I am sitting on the person’s right, the cover is almost impossible to see. So I will look for an excuse to move to the person’s left. I found myself in this very situation at the basketball practice. I had a half a Subway sandwich in my lap and wolfed it down quickly in order to have some trash to throw away. That allowed me to walk back to my seat from the reader’s left. Unfortunately, this particular reader had the book flat in his lap and I couldn’t make out anything.

I could have asked when he paused to check his phone. But honestly, I hate it when people ask me what I am reading because it breaks the flow and spoils the spell. “Whatcha reading?” someone asks, and I’ll usually hold up the book so they can see the title. “Oh, that looks interesting,” they say, and with that single phrase judge the book by its cover, “what’s it about?” which leads off into the mundane world, far off from the magical place I was held spellbound a few moments earlier. I realize the irony in this, but what can I do, it’s this disease?

Instead, I’ll keep casting glances at the book trying to tease out what it is from various hints I catch: an author’s last name, the title of a chapter. Meanwhile, all of this has taken away from my own reading. Instead of enjoying whatever it was that had engrossed me moments before, I’m trying to figure out what this fella’s engrossed in. I realize the irony here, too, but I am helpless.

Kindles and e-book readers have made this maddeningly more difficult. If someone has a Kindle propped on their knees instead of a meaty hardcover, it is virtually impossible to figure out what they are reading, short of asking, and we’ve already been there.

So difficult is the task of teasing out the titles of these books that they become their own reward. I’ve taken to collecting these titles, the ones I uncover anyway, the way a lepidopterologist collects their brightly-winged specimens. I jot these precious titles in my Field Notes notebook even if I never plan on reading them. The effort is too much to waste. My most recent specimen, successfully collected (at great effort) at the very basketball practice herein described: Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove.

Biblio curiositas is not limited to what I nearby person is reading. If I see books anywhere, I need to know what they are. Like a prospector panning for gold, I need to filter through them in search of a gem. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we headed out to Woodlawn and toured an old plantation house. On the same property, a few hundred yards away, is the Pope-Leighty house, a Frank Lloyd Wright house custom built for a fellow who really wanted a FLW place of his own. While Peter, our guide, described the architectural detail of the living room of the 1,200 square foot house, I faced the wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves at the back of the room, skimming the titles there as quickly as I could.

If someone is reading a book in a TV show or movie, I want to know what it is they are reading. If I happen to recognize the book, I squeal with delight.

Science fiction conventions are a particularly dangerous place for someone with biblio curiositas, as one might imagine. With people scattered throughout the hotel lobby, restaurant, and bar, noses deep in books, such places are minefields, making it nearly impossible to cross a room without stealing a glance or two or three or four.

As I said, biblio curiositas is a mild malady, but it does have one benefit that makes up for all of its symptoms: there is no known cure. If you’ve got the disease, you’d got it for life. That makes me happy.

1,000 Books To Read Before You Die

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality a reader can possess. — Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”

This quote opens a new book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich. The book caught my attention when I saw it on a list of “years best” books, thus making it a bit meta. I’m not a big fan of “years best” lists when those lists emerge before the year is out, but I can’t help but be attracted to books that are essentially lists of other books.

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

I ordered a hardcover edition of Mustich’s book and it arrived over the weekend. It is a big book, 948 pages, and contains an alphabetically listing of one man’s idea of a thousand books to read before you die. Each entry contains information about the book in question, as well as the author’s own comments. The book is chock full of quotes, picture of book and authors. It’s really rather delightful. I wanted the hardcover edition in order to be able to mark it up with my own notes.

At the back of the book is a handy checklist of the 1,000 books included. I spent an hour perusing the list, gleefully making a check beside each book I have already read. I was confident I would have read many of these books already. It turned out I had read 59 out of 1,000, or just about 6% of the total.

Here are the 59 books I have read. They are listed in the order the appear in the checklist. If the book has a number it is the number from my list of books I’ve read since 1996. If the book says “BL” it means I read it before I started tracking what I read.

  • BL – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • 748 – The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
  • 17 – Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  • 18 – Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
  • 19 – Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  • 62 – The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  • 37 – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • 254 – The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  • 276 – A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • 277 – Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  • 811 – The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
  • 162 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
  • 716 – The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
  • 163 – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
  • 168 – The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
  • 186 – Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
  • 95 – Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins
  • 714 – A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  • 722 – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  • 196 – The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  • 217 – Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
  • 253 – Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
  • 682 – The Firm by John Grisham
  • 577 – Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
  • 174 – Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
  • 290 – A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  • 574 – The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  • 302 – Dune by Frank Herbert
  • 412 – Carrie by Stephen King
  • 472 – 11/22/63 by Stephen King
  • 713 – Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  • BL – A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
  • BL – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
  • BL – The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  • BL – The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
  • 453 – A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
  • 200 – Truman by David McCullough
  • 358 – A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • 218 – The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  • 560 – The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
  • 826 – All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
  • 201 – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
  • 42 – The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
  • 250 – The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • 311 – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
  • BL – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
  • BL – Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  • BL – Henry V by William Shakespeare
  • BL – Macbeth by William Shakespeare
  • BL – Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
  • 121 – City by Clifford D. Simak
  • 780 – Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
  • 197 – Longitude by Dava Sobel
  • 248 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • 244 – Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck
  • 524 – Dracula by Bram Stoker
  • 511 – Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  • 805 – The Double Helix by James D. Watson

There’s obviously a lot missing from my list with respect to Mustich’s 1,000 books. But, I have a list of over 800 books of my own, most of which are not on Mastich’s list, so we are probably even.

The great thing about a book like this is that it can help ease the passage of those times when I can’t figure out what to read next. There are lots of books that I want to read, and browsing the list and then reading a little bit more about a book can help pique my interest. In reviewing Mustich’s list, several books jumped out as ones that I would like to read. These include:

  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  • All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  • O Pioneers by Willa Cather
  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  • Their Finest Hour by Winston Churchill
  • The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  • The Civil War by Shelby Foote
  • The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
  • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
  • Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
  • Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  • The World According to Garp by John Irving
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
  • The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
  • Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
  • The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré
  • The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
  • Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
  • The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
  • Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
  • The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys
  • Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
  • Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson

Lists like these are fun. They are fertilizer for the mind, and they help me figure out what I want to read next, when I find myself in the doldrums. Mustich’s book isn’t only a great reference, it is beautifully done, and fun to flip through, look at the pictures, and read the quotes scattered throughout.

Vacationing in Bookland

It recently occurred to me that books are like vacations. There is often an extended period of anticipation, during which I eagerly look at the calendar each morning to see how much longer before the book comes out. Then there is the journey, the act of reading the book and experiencing all it has to offer. About halfway through the book I get that uneasy feeling. It’s halfway over. It’s three-quarters over. Gosh, how I wish this book was just 100 pages longer. And then, all too soon, the book is finished, and while the experience had been a great one, I’m left feeling a little empty inside. How could it have gone by so fast?

I’ve experienced this a few times recently. A week ago Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher book, Past Tense came out. I’d been looking forward to it for a month or so leading up to it. I devoured the book, and before the sun had set on that same day, I’d finished it. I think of books like these as weekend getaways. The anticipation is fun, but I go into it knowing that the book won’t last long. Weekend getaways are more frequent than more elaborate vacations, and I know I have others coming up to look forward to. Today, for instance, John McPhee’s latest collection, The Patch arrived, and another weekend getaway gets underway.

The Patch by John McPhee

Then there are books like Gary Giddins’s Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946. I’ve been anticipating this book for 17 years. When the book finally arrived, I tried to savor it. Though it appeared at my door two weeks ago, I am only 400 pages through its 700 pages of close print. I am working my way through it slowly, reading it carefully, trying to soak up every bit of it. Each dip I take is like a fine meal and I don’t want to miss any of it. I know that I am more than halfway through the book, and dark thoughts about another 17 year wait before Volume 3 have started to creep in. Still, I force them back. A book like this is like a once-in-a-decade vacation, and I know when it is over, it will be a while before I get to experience something like it again.

Often when I finish a good book, I have a difficult time settling into the next one. That’s not much different than returning from vacation and settling back into the home routine. We head to Florida for several weeks each holiday season. We leave our house on a cold, and sometimes, snowy day, and 24 hours later, we are driving across the border into Florida, where the temperatures are in the 80s. The return trip is the reverse, leaving that warm weather for snow, sleet, and cold. Vacations mask reality and coming back to that reality can be hard. That is the way it is for me with a good book. I struggle with what to read next, often starting half a dozen books before finally settling on something.

I try to keep those weekend getaways coming. In the near future, I’ve got Franklin and Winston by Jon Meacham lined up. I’ve got The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created by Jane Levy, and Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, and If Wishes Were Horses by W. P. Kinsella, and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. These mini-vacations are like waypoints on the way to our real vacation, now less than five weeks away.

There is one difference between books and vacations that I should mention: books are cheaper than vacations.

The Character of Books

When I started reading in the late 1970s, all books were on paper. There were hardcover books, and paperbacks. There were trade paperbacks, and an occasionally rare edition. But they were all paper.

I began keeping a list of the books I read in 1996. Even then, it wasn’t until my 408th book in June of 2009, thirteen years after I started the list, that I read my first e-book, Polaris by Jack McDevitt. Jump ahead another four years to February 2013, and that’s when I listened to my first audiobook, Misery by Stephen King.

It seems to me that each form of book has its own character, and that there are tradeoffs one has to live with when choosing a format.

The character of audiobooks

These days, the vast majority of the books I read are audiobooks. (I use the term “read” for audiobooks as a shorthand. I’ve discussed my thoughts on reading vs. listening to audiobooks elsewhere.) Of the 823 books I’ve finished since 1996, 282 of them (34%) are audiobooks. Although I was skeptical about audiobooks for a long time before I tried them, I enjoy them today for two main reasons:

  1. I can read more with an audiobook. I can read at times that I would not be able to read a paper or e-book: commuting to work, working out, walking in the park, doing chores around the house. Since I started listening to audiobooks in 2013, I have steadily increased the speed at which I listen to books. These days 1.5x speed sounds perfectly normal to me, and I’ve read quite a few books recently at 1.75x speed.

  2. The narration often adds a dimension that just isn’t there on paper. This is particularly true in fiction, although I’ve experienced it in nonfiction books as well.

The character of e-books

I’d say my least favorite way to read a book is as an e-book. I’ve read only 58 e-books since that first one in June 2009. They are my format of last resort. I stare at a screen enough these days, and I find myself tiring out faster when reading an e-book than reading a book on paper. There is something cold about an e-book that I can’t quite put my finger on. You can’t interact with an e-book in the same way you can with a paper book.

This goes for magazines as well. A number of the magazines I subscribe to offer digital access, but the digital versions can’t really compare to the print version. National Geographic is a good example. As beautiful as the interface is in digital format, I prefer to read the printed issues.

E-books have two advantages over paper books: portability and size. There is no such thing as a stack of e-books. That’s great for travel, but sad when I consider how much I enjoy browsing my bookshelves, or stacks of books on my desk or nightstand. E-books are also more portable than paper. I can read an e-book on my Kindle device, and if I forget that device, I can always pull the book up on my phone.

But the coldness remains. Somehow, an e-book always feels like cheating to me, a feeling I don’t have when listening to an audiobook.

The character of paper books

Despite my love of audiobooks for allowing me to read more, there is something about the character of a paper book that can’t be replicated in a digital medium. Sometimes, I will listen to an audiobook and follow along in the paper book. I did this recently while re-reading It by Stephen King. I had a thick paperback copy that was relatively untouched when I started. Just riffling the pages, and smelling the accumulated scents of the book was an olfactory delight impossible to duplicate in digital media. I love the smell of books, especially used books. I love the smell of book stores. It adds character to a book that you just can’t get from an audiobook and certainly not from an e-book.

It by Stephen King

Then there is the tactile sensations, the feeling of the pages. The copy of It I was reading had tissue thin paper very smooth to the touch. This spine of the book was stiff when I started, and ridged with a geological record of my journey by the time I finished. Those tactile qualities are absent from audiobooks.

As I read, I often highlight passages, and write in the margins. I make the book mine. Audiobooks are terrible for this. You can make “clips” but the mechanism to do this is clumsy and awkward, and virtually useless. E-books have done a better job with highlighting, but the highlights look too antiseptic, and the notes are hidden from the page. I would like it much better if you could mark up an e-book page free-form, they way I mark up paper pages. Sometimes I’ll underline a few lines. Sometimes I’ll circle an entire passage. Other times I’ll write in the margins. I want to be able to see these at a glance as I flip through a book. You just can’t do this in audiobooks, or e-books.

My desire to read as much as I can keeps me using audiobooks, although I sometimes listen along with a paper copy that I can markup. I’ve come to look forward to some narrators as much as I do the authors. But my first love is paper. The smell of the pages, their texture, the sound they make when you riffle through them, and the markups (mine, or in the case of used books, sometime someone else’s) brings a character to an individual copy that makes each one unique.

The 17-Year Itch: Or, Waiting for the Sequel

I have a love/hate relationship with sequels. With very good books, I always want more. In nonfiction, this could be something like Edmund Morris’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt, which came out in 3 separate volumes spanning several years. For fiction, Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles comes to mind. I loved the first two books in the series, but have been waiting a long time now for The Doors of Stone.

There is also a difference in reading a completed series, and reading each volume as it appears. Think of the wait a person would have if they read Will Durant’s Our Oriental Hertiage when it first came out in 1935. The 11th and final volume didn’t appear until 40 years later in 1975. Or consider the wait someone would have if they picked up a copy of Jefferson the Virginian by Dumas Malone in 1948 and didn’t get to read the final volume, The Sage of Monticello until 1981. I read all six of those Malone book over the space of two years. A forty year wait makes the 7 years since the last Kingkiller book seem small.

There is something to be said about consistency. Take the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child. About this time each year, a new Reacher book appears. A books has appeared, consistently since 1997. Having already read the first 22 books in the series, I am already itching for Past Tense, the 23rd book in the series, at the end of November.

For me, the longest wait for a sequel has been over 17 years as I write this. Back in 2001, I came across Gary Giddins’s biography of Bing Crosby, Bing Crosby: The Early Years: 1903-1940. Crosby is my all-time favorite entertainer. I love his music, I enjoy his movies, and I was delighted to find a new (at the time) biography about him. I dove right into the book, and I wasn’t disappointed. The title also made me happy, for it implied that this was the first a a multivolume biography. And so I waited.

And waited.

Years passed, then a decade with no sequel in sight. I would search online and find rumors that maybe a book was being written but there was no publisher for the book. Then maybe no sequel was being written after all. It was impossible to tell. Then, late last year, the rumor appeared to be confirmed that a second book had been written and would be coming out sometime in late 2018.

I am thrilled to say that day has come. I pre-ordered the book on Amazon as soon as I saw it, and today, the book is coming in the mail. I have already received my “Your order is on the way” notice from Amazon. Before long, I will have in my hands Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946 by Gary Giddins. And it only took 17 years of patience.

Bing Crosby Swinging on a Star

Actually, this gives me hope. If I can wait 17 years for the second volume of a Bing Crosby biography, then I can be equally patient for The Doors of Stone or The Winds of Winter. I certainly don’t hold the wait against the authors. As a writer, I know how hard it can sometimes be to get a story just right. But as a reader, when something is that good, I want more as soon as possible.

Perhaps this is another symptom of the instantaneous gratification that so dominates our society. I wonder if Durant readers were equally impatient between 1935 when Our Oriental Heritage came out and 1939 when The Life of Greece was published?

I imagine there is no need to tell you what I will be doing this evening. I imagine it will only take a few days to get through the new Bing Crosby bio. Which brings me to my final complaint about sequels. I empathize with people who are willing to wait for an entire series to come out before they read it–although I don’t have the willpower to do it myself. That’s because, after 17 years of waiting, it will take me 2 or 3 days to tear through the book–and if there third volume, then the waiting begins all over again, with the clock reset to 00:00:00:00.

On Book Ratings and Reviews

When it comes to book ratings I am not fan. One reason I have been reluctant to use a system like Goodreads is because it seems to be centered around a 5-star rating system. (Another reason is the mishmash user interface that is overly busy and confusing.)

What’s wrong with a 5-star rating system? As a consumer of such a system, I find it difficult to know what each level means? It seems to me that some books that get 5-stars are books that I know I wouldn’t like, and others that get 3-stars are book I know I’ve loved. That isn’t particularly helpful. Ah, but there’s a density to the system as well! If 50,000 people give a book 5-stars that’s got to mean something, right? Sure! It means 50,000 people might like a book–or perhaps that 100 people really enjoyed it and 49,900 ranked it highly so as to seem not out-of-step with the rest of society. Either way, it still doesn’t tell me if I will like the book. The only way for me to know is to read the book. And that is a judgement call.

Early on, when using a tool like Goodreads, I would rank books. Over time, however, I have stopped because I don’t find it helpful. In my own list, I don’t rank books. Instead, I answer two simple questions:

  1. Is this a book I would consider reading again someday?
  2. Would I recommend this book to someone asking for a book on a particularly subject?

If the answer to both these questions is “yes”, then I mark the book as one I would recommend, and move on. To me, that seems much more useful than a 5-star rating. Part of my problem with the 5-star rating is that there is no consistency of measurement. Even I don’t know what I mean when I rank one book 4-stars and another book 5-stars. What is the difference? What pushed that book up one star? It is much easier for me to say, sure, I’d absolutely read the book again, or recommend it if someone asked me if I knew of a good book on, says, boxing in the 1950s.

Book reviews are almost as useless to me as ratings. Almost, but not quite. Too many reviews I’ve read outside professional forums (i.e. review columns in newspapers and magazines) are critical of things completely unrelated to the context of the book under scrutiny. “This book is way over priced–1-star!” “When my book was delivered it was damaged.” Too many reviews seem to focus on the author and not the content. There are also those reviews that give too much away, or try to be too erudite. I wrote a review column for a magazine for a year or so, and in my reviews, I tried (a) to keep them short, (b) to focus on what I liked about the book in question, and (c) relate it to other things that happened to be on my mind when reading it. Those are the kinds of reviews I would find useful.

Still, reading, like writing, can be a lonely business, and in an effort to be more social about it, I have started to update Goodreads again. You can find what I am currently reading on my Goodreads page. You can also find what I have read in the past there, although I still consider this list to be my authoritative source. There are a few caveats:

  1. I’m not rating the books.
  2. I am writing short reviews, but I wouldn’t necessary call them reviews. When I finish reading a book, I generally scribble some comments about it in my journal. I am writing for my review a cleaned up version of what goes into my journal, which may or may not be useful as a review. You’ll have to skim through a few of them to find out.

If these caveats don’t scare you away, feel free to friend me on Goodreads.

People Used to Be Travelers

Sometimes a single line from a book really knocks me in the gut. Earlier this week I was reading Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams. Adams was chatting with his guide, an Australian named John, when John said, “People used to be travelers. Now they are tourists.” I paused to jot down the quote and as I did, the truth of it, at least as it pertains to me, really began to sink in.

One of the things my mom told me when I was young was that books could take me anywhere. In recent years, I have taken that to heart. Busy as we are, we don’t have much time these days for travel and adventure, so I have been getting mine through books.

Reading Cannibal Queen by Stephen Coonts, I’ve flown in a biplane to all of the lower 48 states. I’ve sat as a passenger with William Least-Heat Moon while reading Blue Highways and have twice traveled the roads of the country with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. I’ve gone into the Amazon with David Grann’s Lost City of Z.

I have a particular fondness for Alaska. I’ve been there with John McPhee in his outstanding book Coming into the Country. I returned there with Ken Ilgunas’s Walden on Wheels. I’ve spent time there with James Campbell in two of his books, Braving It and The Final Frontiersman. I can never seem to get enough.

I’ve traveled roads with journalists like Philip Caputo, who drove from the tip of Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in The Longest Road; and with Charles Kuralt in Charles Kuralt’s America and Life on the Road.

I’ve sailed around the world with Joshua Slocum in Sailing Alone Around the World and I’ve survived at sea for 76 days in Adrift by Steven Callahan. I’ve gone from the earth to the moon in Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon.

What all of these books have in common is that they are stories of travelers not tourists. When I read, I tending to be the former, but when I travel, I tend to be the latter.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 10th anniversary. We are not big on gifts, but we got each other something for our 10th, and what my wife got me was a frame map of the United States complete with pins so that we can mark all of the places we’ve been together. I got started almost at once, pinning those places that we have been together (or with our kids).

Pin map of US

We’ve been all over the east coast and in most cases, we’ve driven the places marked by those pins. We like road trips. Sometimes, we go to the same place over and over again. We always drive down to Florida in December because we have family there. We often drive up to Maine in the summer for the same reason. Occasionally we pick a place because we’ve never been. This summer we took a road trip through parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

These are fun trips, but we are tourist on these trips. We stopped at Dollywood, and hiked in the Great Smoky Mountains, and spent a night in Gatlinburg. We visited Nashville and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Andrew Jackson’s home, Hermitage. In Kentucky we toured Mammoth Cave. These were fun and it was a great trip, but Mark Adam’s guide’s words still sting me a bit. We were tourists, not travelers. I want to be a traveler, not a tourist. I know there is an important difference, but I am not entirely sure I know what that difference is.

Our map shows only the United States. We’ve been outside the U.S. together. We’ve been to the Caribbean, and Cartagena, Colombia. We’ve been to Panama, and ridden a train down the length of the canal. We’ve been to the rainforests of Costa Rica, and climbed waterfalls in Jamaica. But in all those places, too, we were tourists and not travelers. Somehow, I need to learn that difference. It seems vitally important.

In the meantime, I plan to continue my travels through books. I enjoyed Mark Adams’s Turn Right at Machu Picchu and discovered he has a much more recent book, Tip of the Iceberg about his adventures in Alaska. I also plan to spent time flying around the Alaska bush with the late bush pilot Don Sheldon. He’s appeared in several of the Alaska books I’ve read and his story sounds fascinating.

A Year On Paper

About a year ago I wrote about the paradox of journaling. I had read about Thoreau’s journal. One commenter pointed to a guy who’d been keeping a diary on paper for 66 years. Not long after the post, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. There, I discovered that more than 7,000 pages of Da Vinci’s notebooks have survived the 500 years since his death. I wondered, as did Isaacson, how many of my blog posts, tweets, and text files would exist 500 years from now.

A New Journal

So I started keeping a journal on paper again. My notebook of choice was the Moleskine Art Plus Sketchbook, A4 sized, hardcover. I optimistically ordered four of them. One of the challenges of journaling on paper is going back and searching for something. Given that I expected to index my journals, I decided that each entry would get a unique number, and I’d key my index to the entry number, rather than the page number. A year later, I have filled 2-1/2 of the Moleskine notebooks (about 241 pages) for a total of 823 distinct entries.

One thing I love about these journals is that they are multimedia. Read the post about the British diarist made me realize that what I put into the journal doesn’t have to be exclusively writing. So there are many pages with photos I’ve taken, pasted in. For instance, here’s an early page a few days after I started when I was attending a conference in Atlanta.

Another thing I started doing is writing short entries about books that I just finished reading. In these entries, I usually include a photo of the cover. Here is an example of one such entry after I read Essays of E. B. White.Essays of E B WhiteOther times, I might find some interesting picture that I really like in a magazine. This one might be from Outside magazine, I can’t remember. But bears, especially grizzlies, fascinate me.
Grizzly

 

In order to make things easier to find, I decided to index each volume after completing it. This was time consuming, and I ended filling something like 300 index cards.

Index Cards

So I opted, somewhat reluctantly, for an alternative: I actually type up each volume into a text file. I wrote a series of scripts to parse the text file and I now have at my fingertips, a set of commands I can run which will lead me to just about anything I am looking for in a few seconds. This isn’t the most efficient use of my time, but it is better than creating the index cards. And while the text files may get lost over time, I have a feeling the notebooks themselves will last.

Field Notes, redux

At the same time, I still keep my Field Notes notebook in my back pocket at all times. This is my repository of short term information, observations, and random notes, many of which get transposed to the Moleskine journal at the end of the day. I’ve gotten better at pulling my notebook out to write down observations, regardless of who might be standing around. (I used to feel self-conscious doing this.)

Moreover, I now keep two Field Notes notebooks in my pocket. One is for the same thing I’ve always used it for. The other is for jotting down books, articles, and other things that I might want to read someday. I used the Field Notes checklist notebook for this purpose.

Composition books

Remember those old school Compositions books? Target has them in back-to-school sales for 50-cents each and I’ve bought dozens of them. I use them at work for everything I do. In the last year or so I’ve filled 4 of these 200-pages notebooks. Meeting notes go in them, but they also act as lab books for things I am working on. If I am writing code, or installing some software, the steps I followed get entered here, the error messages I encounters and how I worked around them. All of it goes into these notebooks. They have made a real difference in how prepared I feel.

And paperless?

I still use Evernote, but it is mostly automated these days. I pull in various statements automatically using FileThis. I still scan important paper that I get in the mail.

But I have to say that if my Going Paperless experiment taught me anything, it’s that my heart is with paper. There is something about a Field Notes notebook that Evernote simply can’t replicate. There is something about a Moleskine journal that Day One can’t touch.

Besides, I enjoy seeing the jumble of notebooks askew on the shelve above my desk at home. There is something remarkably comforting about that.

Bookshelf of notebooks

The Butterfly Effect of Reading

When it comes to discussion of books the three words I most dread are, “You should read….” I have developed a process for discovering books I want to read and I put my entire trust in that process. I call it the Butterfly Effect of Reading. I believe it is a result of the freedom I have had since I was very young to read pretty much whatever I wanted. I’ve gained a trust in my ability to know what will interest me far better than anyone else.

Before discussing the Butterfly Effect of Reading, I want to touch on two other reasons why I dread those three words. In both cases, it’s not that I don’t think I’d like the recommendation being offered. Instead, it’s that I know that it will likely be a very long time, if ever, before I read the recommended book and that fills me with guilt. After all, someone has gone out of their way to make a recommendation. It seems the least I could do to read what it is they are recommending–or at least give it a try. But there are two problems:

Call the first “typecasting.” When people learn that I have written science fiction stories, they seem to immediately assume that I enjoy science fiction movies. This is despite my having said it repeatedly here on the blog, at conventions, and elsewhere, I am, generally speaking, not a fan of sci-fi movies, and I rarely, if ever watch them. Similarly, if people know I am a science fiction writer, they will often recommend science fiction books to read. But I don’t really read much science fiction anymore. I have, at least for the time being, lost interest in it. Or better yet, I have gained interest in other things.

Second is what I would call “synchronicity.” Unless someone is regularly consulting my reading list, it would be hard to know what topic is currently occupying my mind. Upon learning I am a reader, a friend might suggest the latest Vince Flynn novel, when, in fact, my state of mind is centered around mid-twentieth century history. The recommendation someone makes, “You should read the latest Vince Flynn novel,” might be a perfectly valid one, and the book might be one I enjoy, but there is no way I am going to give up what I am reading at the moment to switch to the Vince Flynn novel. We’re just not mentally in sync on what we are reading.

Back to the Butterfly Effect of Reading: Even if the Vince Flynn recommendation is something that I would like, I can never commit to it until I am ready, and it is hard to say when I will be ready because of the butterfly effect of reading. Much of what I read next is based on what I am reading now, but only in a random sort of way. For example, I am at the time of this writing reading The Fifties by David Halberstam. I often have a short list of the next few books I’d like to read. That list, when I started The Fifties, included Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, and Rush by Stephen Fried. But that small queue is very sensitive to what I am currently reading. So, as I read the chapter in The Fifties on the arms race and the making of the h-bomb, I was reminded of my long-standing desire to read Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes. (The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes was so good I read it twice.) Suddenly, Dark Sun went to the top of the queue. A chapter I read today may send me off in another direction. I have a great deal of trust in my own sense of what interests me, and especially in how this butterfly effect of reading works upon me, and that takes precedence over all recommendations from others.

The Butterfly Effect of Reading works in other ways. Last week, I was in Denver for a work-related conference. One of the speakers at the conference was Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg. I was, at the time, reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. After listening to Duhigg speak, I was impressed and decided to bump his book, The Power of Habit up toward the top of my queue. I read it a few days ago, and enjoyed it.

Sometimes the Butterfly Effect of Reading acts as an alert for a set of mental lists I keep: authors I like or books I am anticipating. I know, for instance, that the new Stephen King novella, Elevation is coming out at the end of the month. That will jump onto my queue, bumping other things already there. Ditto for the second volume of Gary Giddin’s biography of Bing Crosby, Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946, set to hit bookstores around the same time as Elevation. And each of these books holds its own set of random connections, which may push the books that are in my queue today further down the line. You can see, therefore, that recommendations I get from friends might get shunted again and again until it becomes embarrassing to admit that I have not yet checked out the book.

When discussing books with friends, I try hard to avoid saying, “You should read…” unless I am explicitly asked for a recommendation. When I write about the books I read, I try to cast my writing as books that I enjoyed. There is absolutely no way I can tell if you would enjoy them. I do this because I am sensitive to the hypocrisy of recommending books when I don’t take well to such recommendations myself. I am not always successful, but I always bear it in mind.

My butterfly effect method of finding what to read has its flaws. As someone recently pointed out to me, my reading list would likely be enhanced by increased diversity in authors: more women and people of color. While this is certainly true, my methods for choosing what I want to read often overrides other sensibilities. My willpower is weak in this regard. I can stand in front of a display of cakes and cookies and without a second thought, ignore it and pass it by. But despite my efforts to maintain a disciplined queue of books I want to read next, something else will catch my fancy and I’ll throw it all out the window for that one read. This has been the way of things since at least college, when I had to read something for class, but would often put it off because I found something more interesting to read first.

For me, the Butterfly Effect of Reading is one of the most wonderful thing about books. In some respects, it is like the World Wide Web with hyperlinks acting as the connective tissue between seeming disparate topics. With the Butterfly Effect, those links remain unseen until I stumble right on them. There’s no advanced warning, no blue underlines calling them out. They are hidden doors that remain undiscovered until you realize you are standing before one, and dare to open it and see what’s inside.

The Story of My Life

Current book stack

Over the last twenty five years, I have kept a journal more often than I have not. Over the last 14 I have written more than 6,000 posts on this blog. Over the last 11 years I have tweeted more than 25,000 times. There’s a lot for me to look back on if I wanted to learn something about myself. Despite all of that, when I want to know the story of my life (at least since 1996) I turn to my reading list.

I have kept a list of every book I have finished since January 1, 1996. The entries are brief. Each book gets a number. I record the title, the author, the medium (paper, e-book, audiobook), the number of pages (or listening time) and the date I finished reading it. If I like a book enough to want to read it again (or recommend it, if asked for a recommendation), I mark it with an asterisk. The list has been with me for nearly 25 years, growing one entry at time, at what often feels like a snails pace. The most recent entry, made just a few days ago, is as follows:

805. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson; 256pp/4:11 (9/23/2018)

This reading list, the master source of which is kept in a red covered, college ruled Composition notebook, acts as a kind of memory primer for the story of my life. I can flip to any page in the book (I’ve filled 35 pages so far), randomly point to an entry, and at once can recall where I was, and what was going on in my life while I was reading the book in question.

In addition to the entries I make into my Composition book, I replicate the entries in a text file which I make available online, for those who might be curious.

Such lists seem pretty hard to come by, but they do exist. The reading list I’ve followed along the longest, that seems similar in character and format to my own is Eric W. Leuliette’s “What I have read since 1974“. Another one is none other than Art Garfunkel’s reading list–which goes back to 1968. Strangely, though, I’ve been hard-pressed to find many others. I think Goodreads might have killed the notion of a simple list of books one’s read, or at least vastly overcomplicated it.

I was glad, therefore, to discover Pamela Paul’s book, My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books. The “Bob” to whom Paul refers is her “book of books,” a list of all the books she’s read from the time she was a teenager. The book itself uses her book of books as a focal point for a literary memoir. It made me think about my own version of Bob:

  • For a book to get on the list I have to finish it. I am surprisingly strict at enforcing this rule. To be otherwise would be to somehow cheat myself. Paul also tracked books she didn’t finish. I think my list would be at least twice as long if I tracked books that I didn’t finish.

  • What constitutes a book? Here I am less strict and give myself the benefit of the doubt. For instance, I’ve included on my list all of the issues of Astounding Science Fiction I read for my Vacation in the Golden Age series, even though they are magazines. I justified this to myself by saying that, at around 60-80,000 words per issue, they were as long as a book. A handful of novellas have made it onto the list, but always when they were in the form of a standalone book. And I’ve counted audiobooks as books because the text is the same as the printed book, which is good enough for me.

  • Paul argued that her book of books was revealing about herself and she was reluctant to share it with others. I am the opposite in this regard. While the list might be revealing, the context surrounding the books is virtually invisible except to me. Then, too, I make the list available in part because I wish there were more lists like this available to peruse for suggestions.

I have, over the years, pulled various metrics from my reading list. Here are some interesting stats:

  • The 805 books I’ve read amounts to 330,802 pages, or about 14,300 pages per year over the 23 year period I’ve kept the list.
  • The average length of a book on the list is 410 pages.

  • The longest book I’ve read is Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows. It was 1,424 pages. I have read 14 books that are 1,000 pages or longer.

  • In 2013 I started listening to audiobooks in addition to reading e-books and paper books. The volume up my reading has gone up dramatically since. The table below illustrates the impact of the change

Metrics 1996-2012 2013-2018
Years 17 6
Total books 501 304
Total pages 193,478 137,324
Avg books/yr 29 50
Avg pages/yr 11,381 22,887
Avg pages/bk 386 451
Max books/yr 42 87*

The list is fun for pulling out these statistics, but perhaps even more, the list tells the story of my life better than anything else I have written. Opening randomly to page 26, my eye falls on entry number 625:

655. This Old Man by Roger Angell, 320pp (11/25/2015)

Despite this being nearly 3 years ago, I still remember walking to a nearby ABC store to pick up some tequila for margaritas while listening to the book. Seeing the title brings me back to that walk. Another random roll and we land on:

431. Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer, 329pp (7/13/2010)

Seeing this entry, I am suddenly seated in a bar at Logan Airport, waiting for my flight back from a recent Readercon, and the time slipped by unnoticed as I am totally absorbed by this original book on the writer’s life. A flip back to the very beginning of the list:

7. A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski, 331pp (3/31/1996)

I don’t remember much about the book, but I remember sitting on the balcony of my small Studio City apartment, with my chair tilted back against the wall, reading this one.

At a glance, I see a title and am somewhere else. Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon (no. 577) puts me on the long drive from Virginia to Maine. Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (no. 653, second time reading the book) transports me to a cool fall evening watching my son at soccer practice while I listen to Nick Podehl’s wonderful narration. I see book no. 199, John Adams by David McCullough, and it is nighttime in Castine, Maine. Everything is silent and out the windows it is pitch dark, and there I am in the midst of the American Revolution.

On September 11, 2001, I was reading Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (book no. 208). On the day my grandfather died I was reading Gateway by Frederik Pohl (book no. 300). On the day Frederik Pohl died, I was reading Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno (book no. 539).

On the day my son was born I was reading Polaris by Jack McDevitt (book no. 408), the very first e-book to appear on my list. When my middle daughter was born, I was reading Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941 edited by John Campbell (book no. 464). And on the day my youngest daughter was born, I was reading Up Till Now by William Shatner (book no. 650).

There aren’t a lot of things I really enjoy browsing, but a good, simple reading list is one of them. It’s too bad that Goodreads has put such simple lists on the endangered species list.

Writing at the Turn of the Century

Over the last few years I’ve read several books that I enjoyed so much, I wanted to know more about their authors. I recently completed Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Times. It took Malone decades to complete. I was fascinated by the sheer dogged persistence of someone completing such a monumental task. It seemed like it was more than a task. It felt like a quest.

I have also read the first four volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume Story of Civilization series. I’ve loved those books not just for the history, but for the wonderful writing style. The first volume of the series was published in 1935, years before the beginning of the Second World War. The final volume was published in 1975. All told, it took the Durants 40 years to write the books.

As interesting as I have found these books, I am equally intrigued by the authors. I want to know more about them. After completing Jefferson and His Times, I did some searching and found My Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson: The Life of Dumas Malone by William C. Hyland. This biography was just as enjoyable as the story of Jefferson’s life.

At present, I am also reading A Dual Autobiography by Will and Ariel Durant, hoping gain insight into the authors of such a massive history of civilization.

I have come away from these books with a similar insight I’ve taken from books like Red: The Life and Times of a Great American Writer by Ira Berkow, One Man’s Meat by E. B. White, and Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee: these writers of vastly different backgrounds, and writing on vastly different subjects all managed to do the writing and research without the aid of computers and the Internet.

Much of the shop talk I’ve been involved in with other writers centers around the tools we use: word processors, thought-organizers, outlining tools, citation aids, search engines, discussion boards, etc.

I don’t know why it fascinates me, but I love reading about early twentieth century reporters and writers and how they worked in those seemingly dark ages of technology. They took notes on paper. There were no voice recorders so some reporters learned shorthand. They did research in libraries, and often traveled the world (as the Durants did) as part of their effort to get to source material.

Entire multivolume books were written longhand, the paper handed to typists who produced manuscript copy which served as the basis for the text of the book. While there may have been frustrations over poor ribbon quality, or somewhat messy copy, no one was complaining that their typewriter was “frozen” or that they forgot to save their work for the day. Things like spell-checking didn’t exist in their present form, but were easy enough with a dictionary at hand.

It also seems like these writers provided a treasure trove to archivists that modern writers may lack. Edits can be seen on the page in these old manuscripts. First drafts are often handwritten with cross-outs, corrections, and marginal notes right there on the yellowing pages. It is easy to see the transformation of research notes into final book form because every step is preserved on paper. Today, even a first draft in a word processor is not quite the same as a first draft on paper. Typos, corrections, and changes of thoughts vanish in the digital ether and all we see is the resulting text, not the thought process behind it.

Perhaps I am romanticizing the labor that went into production of epics works like The Story of Civilization or Jefferson and His Times. It is entirely possible that the Durants and Malone complained bitterly about the inadequacies of the typewriter and pen, the limitations of the card catalog and carbon paper. But I’ve found no evidence for this. I think the Durants and Malone and many others could be as productive as they were, and could produce massive volumes of well-researched material as readily as they could because they were not distracted by the bells and whistles of technology. They didn’t worry about formatting and style sheets and the format of the files they saved, and whether or not they saved them, or were working on the right version of the document. They focused on the content and the tools were simple enough to not intrude on that process.

I often daydream of being a sportswriter like Red Smith, sitting in a smoke-filled press box, with a portable typewriter before me, watching a ballgame unfold below as I tap away at the noisy keys, knowing that what I wrote on the pages that emerged from my typewriter would appear in newspapers across the country the following day.
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