I just now finished my 1100th book since I started keeping track, way back in 2015.
My 1100th book (not counting comics and books of the graphic novel type) was The Sensuous Dirty Old Man by Dr. “A”, a pseudo-pseudonym for Isaac Asimov. It’s a funny little throwaway humor book capitalizing on the (then) popularity of a whole slew of books on sex that were appearing on bookshelves of the non-yellow variety at the cusp of the 1970s, but particularly the books The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man, respectively ‘authored’ by “J” and “M”. I say ‘throwaway’, and many of the jokes are silly, only a half-step above other books in the humor section meant to be read once and … well, thrown away. But Asimov’s wit is pretty wise and clever, in spite of his punotropism. And his introductory chapters, on “Becoming An Old Man” and “Becoming A Dirty Old Man” are brilliant examples of written humor, which is, in my opinion, the most difficult writing of them all. The book as a whole, I should warn you, is sexist—as one might guess from the very title—was sexist even by the standards of its time. And Asimov himself was reputed to be just such a wannabe-rake as the hero of this book. But … well, it’s all in good fun, and the closing chapter lets us all in on the secret.
In this last set of a hundred books, once again, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries, though the number is down to 35% (31% if we count the comics I read). I should note that this number is comparative to the set of books read in the hundred before the hundred before this last one, as I pledged not to read mysteries for that last set. Science Fiction had the next most volumes read in the latest hundred, with 12 of that ilk. I read the same number of comic books during this last set of one hundred, though, as I said, I don’t count those towards each century of ‘books read’.
My reading pace was slower than the last hundred, though still a pretty good pace. It took 205 days to read this last century, as opposed to 165 or so days for the previous set. Not so many kids’ books this last hundred made the difference. The absolute pace, however, is also slower, in that I read around 131 pages per day this last set, while the previous hundred I read at a pace of 137.5 pages per day. (The gap isn’t quite as wide if we discount the comics, and I’ll note as well that this last tranche includes a re-reading of Tony Hillerman’s People Of Darkness to compare the original source material with the AMC miniseries (the latter not coming off favorably, to my mind), which I did not include in the counting of books up to one hundred, though I am counting those pages. (Originally the Hillerman book was Book Read #95 in this silly tracking project of mine.))
1 Book per 2.05 Days
I’ve just about given up ever getting around to making up some data post for y’all, given that I have a few other (quite silly) irons in the fire already, and I’m often too tired after work. Ah, well.
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