Just this morning (early in the AM) I finished reading the 600th book since beginning to track such things way back in the middle of 2015. Now you can see, perhaps, just why I was so anxious to get the analysis of the previous hundred books out the door; I knew that the next hundred was almost ready to come out of the oven, so to speak, and I needed the space on the countertops.
Though the vast majority of the past hundred books seems to me to have been genre fiction (this is my impression at the moment, knee-jerk though it is, and subject to revision when I finally get around to an actual review of the data), the book which pushed me over the imaginary marker was a short history text, the most wonderful and excellent précis The Barbarian West: The Early Middle Ages A.D. 400–1000, by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill. This very well-written survey of the sometimes murky period between the final collapse of the imperial power of Rome and the rise of the West is full of insights by a true master of his material. Though not a little of his tight prose is devoted to underlining just how limited must be our absolute conclusions concerning many details of the events he discusses, Mr. Wallace-Hadrill provides an almost breathtaking appraisal of the sweeping movements of peoples, trade, and ideas which cross the Western European stage in near dizzying succession during this turbulent age. Likely as not his ideas have been corrected or at least revised in the nearly seventy years since this book was written (suggestions, anyone?), but it is hard for me to believe that anyone has succeeded in bettering his prose. Top marks.
Now I have to confess that I had been trying to read as fast as possible since completing my last hundred books* back on September 12 of 2020. In fact, I had hoped to read the next hundred books in only a hundred days, which would have been December 21st, but I either could not maintain this pace while also doing a silly NaNoWriMo project or could not constrain myself to read only the shortest and easiest books available—though when I promulgate the full list you shall see that I read plenty of (extremely) quick reads over the past set of books. Today’s milestone means that 112 days have passed since I began the last tranche, which gives a ridiculously fast pace of 1.12 days per book read. Although I am tempted to remind you of the earlier reading pace statistics, I feel as if I’ve done that only a few days ago (which I did), and so I’ll save further details for whatever analysis I end up getting around to about these last hundred books.
1 Book per 1.12 Days
One thing I am certain of, however, is that I will not sustain anything like this bookish celerity in the next slice of a hundred books. (Is it peculiar that every time I write “a hundred” some recess of my brain, doubtless affected (in both senses) by too much BBC television, wishes to type “an hundred”?) No, I have decided to forego speed for a more usual reading style, though I am still training one foci of my literary ellipse upon those books which I suspect I may not wish to keep any longer in my library. (One statistic I neglected to mention in my last report was that nearly a quarter of the books read ended up in my ‘To Go Away’ pile; which reminds me, if anyone wants some discards, including some truly wretched so-called ‘self-help’ books, let me know.) The pace I set also meant that I forewent (I joke) my sometime book reviews or rather book reports that I have foisted upon y’all now and then, though I did feel compelled just last week to write that one about the wonderful and the horrible wacko books I read at the end of this set of a hundred. Perhaps I’ll now have both more time and more inclination to tell you a little something about the silly, silly books I still insist on reading all the way through once I pick them from off of my shelves, even if I decide after reading that they shall never darken those shelves again. We shall see.
Until then, and until the full listing of these last hundred books, as well as the analysis of the same, I wish all of you very well. I hope that everyone of you—and many more besides!—will have a very, very good New Year!
*As usual, I exclude those books within my ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ genre from my calculations.
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