I finished my 19th century of books two-and-a-half weeks ago, but haven’t taken time to tell you about it until now because of reasons. Book #1900 in my silly book tracking project was The Wind In The Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, in an Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Somehow I’d never gotten around to reading it as a child, and I thought it best if I read it before I entered my second childhood. And I learned what thousands before me already knew, that it is an exceptional work, a lyrical and lissome tale of perhaps a land of Never Was, but of a perfect tone to captivate and fascinate children of a certain type. The madness of Toad, the wiles and frank friendship offered by Rat, these ring true and could make us maudlin for this Never Was were we to project children’s tales onto the so-called real world. But this beautiful work of pastoral romance and adventure, this paean to a golden age (translation: ‘never existed’) of nature in pleasant village surroundings, shows its wisdom in the growing friendship between Mole and Badger, as well as the final awakening of Toad to maturity.
All the usual caveats apply with this announcement of my reading milestone: I’ve been tracking these only since the middle of 2015; I don’t count comics towards my ‘total’ of Books Read, but I do count all sorts of other things (magazines, children’s books, The Onion or Weekly World News newspapers); and like that and so forth and so on.
I’ll be posting the full list of this last hundred books read shortly, I hope. Though given how long it took me to get to this simple announcement, I wonder.
My pace of reading was slightly slower this century than last, 1.11 days per book versus the previous 1.06 dy/bk. Page count showed an uptick, at over 222 average pages per book, though the pages read per day dropped to about 200 pages per day. Additionally, there were 128 books read which I categorized as Comics—the result of a huge comics buy in Arizona—, meaning that I don’t count them towards my grand ‘Books Read’ total, though I obviously track of them somehow in my database mania. Including those give a reading pace of 2.05 books per day (which is why I don’t include comics in the master count), or 0.49 days per book, and 116.5 avg. pages per book; those 32-pagers drop the average page count drastically.
As I’ve said in previous posts, this ridiculous pace is due to a self-imposed stricture to keep my reading pace on at least parity with my book acquisition pace. I have been successful, mostly … though at what cost?
Book #1801, which kicked off this last century of books, was a volume (the only one I apparently own) of the Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia, an excellent children’s reference work, though hopelessly dated. The illustrations are bright and fun, though the artist was very flattering to both Queen Elizabeth and Adolf Hitler. I almost wish I had the whole set, but I’m trying to have fewer books rather than more just now.
In this last set of 100 books I read 31 Mysteries, 26 Fiction, 8 Science Fiction, and 19 Children’s books. (The Fiction number includes a Western and one book purporting to be Horror.)
1 Book per 1.11 Days
See you soon with the complete Book List! Maybe!