900 Books

Yesterday I finished my 900th book, counting back from the time when my wife gave me a barcode scanner and a book database and I started keeping track of such things, back in 2015.

My 900th book (as usual discounting comic books and graphic novels from my ‘official’ count, of which I’ve read some 118 (at last count)) was an early (almost her earliest) book of poetry from the acclaimed poet of Decatur, Athens, and Athens, A. E. Stallings: Hapax. I’ve liked Stallings’s work since I stumbled upon her poem “Alice, Bewildered” at the Poetry Foundation website—they no longer ‘carry’ it, but you can read it (as of today, 25 February 2023) here. Alice, of course, is one of my favorite characters from literature, and shows up as a guise of the poet in several of her works. (Her initial initial ‘A.’ hides the name Alicia, which is cognate, I suppose. I have no idea if she keeps the initials in homage to Housman, or for the usual reason, or if she just likes Russian style.) The book Hapax is a mixed bag, showing the poet trying to find her punctilious style. I liked the autobiographical section in the beginning the best, though I may just be prejudiced by my own foolish fulsome nostalgia for the South that is no more and likely never was. It’s a good book of poetry all through however; Joe Bob says check it out.

In this last set of a hundred books, once again, I’ve been reading a lot—a whole lot—of mysteries. Almost half of these books (as usual, setting aside the comic books and graphic novels I read) were in the Mystery & Thriller genre. Partly this is acause I’m reading most of my books at work, during my lunch, and that means light reading. Partly it’s because the deeper books take longer to read, maybe. [All of this paragraph up to now was simply copied from my last report on reading my 800th book.]

My reading pace was about the same as for the previous century of books: 258 days to read this last hundred, compared to 259 days for the set before. I see upon examination that I have not only not done any analysis of my previous set of hundred books read, I haven’t even given you the list! I’ll try to make that up to you over my weekend, which will start tomorrow

   1 Book per 2.58 Days   

Hoping to hit you soon with some real data, some real book lists….