Well, I’ve gotten out over my skis a bit, I’m afraid. In my increasingly silly book tracking project I began after receiving book database software from my wife oh many years ago now, I have reached the milestone of having read, officially (which means here that I entered the date I finished the book in the database and can affirm I actually finished it, as opposed to the many books I know I’ve read but which reading happened before I started the aforementioned silly tracking of such things), 1500 Books. Yay! The overreach here occurs because back in March I notified y’all that I’d hit the milestone of 1400 books. Also … yay? I guess. But I promised then a complete listing of all those hundred books, and … I didn’t give you that.
So now I owe you two complete lists of a hundred books, as I’ve given you often before. I’ll get right on that.
The actual Book #1500 read was an entry from the interesting series of Pocket Canons published back in 1998, where the idea occurred to publish the books of the Bible, or some of them, as standalone books, as they would have been known back in the day. So my 1500th book read was The Second Book of Moses, Called Exodus in The Pocket Canons Bible Series. It was a mixed bag. Some of the most exciting incidents in the entire Bible are here, but also are here the deadly dull recitation of the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant and the portable temple, which are really not all that worth re-reading all that often. The issues around the historicity of Exodus are not investigated by David Grossman, who provides the introduction to this book. (Each of the Pocket Canons has a modern literary figure giving the heads-up about what you’re gonna read.)
I’m still trying to read as quickly as possible to keep my ‘Books Read’ figure greater than my ‘Books Bought’ figure. And thus my average page count for this last set of books is only 168 pages per. This goes up to ~196 if we exclude comic books, which I do and I don’t, though I’m not gonna get too much into those weeds just now, especially as I need to focus on getting those book lists out the door.
The first book of this past century was a pocket-sized version of Stephen Mitchell’s version of the Tao Te Ching, read both because it was a quick read (it was not) and it is a great book (which it is). Sometimes Mitchell takes liberties, and he does here, but he is always interesting in his approaches to these old old oh so old works, and he at least does explain some of his more, shall we say, ‘interesting’ choices.
Mysteries were once again the preponderant genre of books read, with 34 out of the one hundred. I read 21 items from the ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ category, though those don’t count towards the 100 book read total. Because of all those individual books of the Bible, as well as a few other exemplars, I read 16 Christian books. Rounding out the totals were 11 books of History, 10 Literature & Fiction (12 if you count a couple of poetry books I read), and—the Tail End Charlie of the bunch—Science Fiction & Fantasy with only 7 books read. More details to follow. I hope.
The pace was a ridiculously speedy 91 days to read these 100 books, though this is in fact 23% slower than the pace set in the last century of books. If we include the comics , the pace was just north of 3/4 days per book read. Of course we don’t, so … moving on.
1 Book per .91 Days
See you soon with Book List(s), I hope!
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