Welp
Has it already been three-and-a-half months since I first realized I’d made another data entry mistake in my Great Book Tracking Project and had to correct my ongoing mistake before giving you, my one or two readers of this blog (I’m being optimistic here), the summary data for the last hundred books I’d read? Yes, yes it has.
As I told you before, I messed up my book count in my database about thirty books into the last tranche of one hundred books, meaning I had to go back and change the data for about seventy book entries (more than that, because of comics (which, as you faithful readers of this blog know, I do not count to the overall total of Books Read, though I do keep count)). And I had to change that datapoint in the same number of entries in my Excel spreadsheet. And I had to do the same in a Libre Office spreadsheet, which I started because of reasons and which is now a parallel document which I should either give up or start using exclusively, but the original reasons are gone and … well, why should you care? Especially if I don’t? But anyway, long story slightly less long, I made those changes, and instituted a checksum (sort of) to prevent this sort of thing happening again (as it had done in the century of books before this one), and so that was good—indeed, the new checkdigit columns actually caught three similar mistakes in my data entry since I started using the new system (which either shows its value or that I’m getting sloppier in my senescence)—but that doesn’t explain why I’m only getting back to this last century of books over a hundred days later. No, that delay is because of my usual issues, which are: reasons, and procrastination.
With all that (not quite) said, let me get on with my usual program of giving you the brief statistical overview of the last set of one hundred books read, only just in time, as I’ve got only something like fifteen books left before I’ve read the next hundred. And so I’ll start by saying that the 1300th Book read, after correcting for my earlier mistake, turns out to be the entry in the Penguin Modern Poets series shown here, Penguin Modern Poets 7 Murphy Silkin Tarn. All three poets wrote poetry with a strong religious sensibility—an unusual occurrence for this series—and Richard Murphy and Nathaniel Tarn acquitted themselves quite well. I found Jon Silkin to be a bit overwrought, which is a danger with any sort of spiritual writing.
As I mentioned in my first abortive notice of 1300 Books Read, the first book in this last set of one hundred turned out to be Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five. (I keep seeing variations of the title, with and without hyphens, but this is what we’re going with here.) I fawned over it endlessly in my mistaken opening for my post about hitting my imaginary 1200 Book goal line, so you can read my deathless prose about how awesome Vonnegut’s book is there. Suffice it to say that I liked it (again). A lot.
The largest number of books read in the last set fell into the Mystery category, with 17 of those read. This is pretty standard for my reading pattern lately, especially as I’m reading a good bit at work during downtime, and those are easier to pick up and put down as needed than detailed works of history or literature. Actually, the genre with the most items read were Comics, as I read 27 of those in that last set. But, as I say …. The 17 mysteries were actually only a little more than the number of straight Fiction books I finished—14—, and I read more History books than Science Fiction & Fantasy in this last group of one hundred (11 versus 10). The real surprise to me was how many ‘Other’ genre books I read, nearly half of the total one hundred. After putting aside those five categories (viz., Comics, Mysteries, Fiction, History, and SF), I read 48 other books from sections such as Humor, Poetry, Religion, Science … heck, there’s even 3 French books in there. (Admittedly, one of those is a French version of the Disney version of the Bambi story originally written by an Austrian, but then again, my French isn’t all that good.)
The pace was only slightly less ludicrous from Books #1201 to #1300, seeing as how I got from the one to the other in only 115 days. This is even more impressive when we consider that I re-read an earlier read book (“on accident”, as my daughter used to say when she was shorter and we lived further north) as well as 27 items in the ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ category. Which don’t, as I will go on about endlessly, don’t count towards the total I use in the … oh, there I go again. The absolute pace was higher than the last tranche, at 230 pages per day (up from 206 the century before). And that’s not including the re-read history book (an Idiot’s Guide to the Civil War) and the comics, which would bring that last stat up to 245 pages per day. (What can I say? It was slow at work.)
1 Book per 1.15 Days
I’ll try to get you the whole list of books read posthaste, as I know I’ll be finishing Book #1400 pretty darn soon now.