(or, The Pointlessness of Data)
As promised earlier, I return to announce that I have now read 100 books — according to the database I keep of my books. When previously i made such announcement, I had to express three caveats, to wit:
- The ‘books’ referred to previously included graphic novels and comics, which perhaps cannot lay claim to full ‘book’ status.
- The earliest dates of books read are an approximation only (more on this below).
- I wrote: “whilst the unexamined life is deemed to be unworthy of living, the micromanaged and databased life may only be a debasing of the actual substance of life itself.”
This note is primarily a discursion upon the last point.
How long did it take me to read 100 books? Well, this is where the second caveat becomes noteworthy. As stated above, the dates given for completing each book are only approximations for the first few books in the list. Thus the beginning of the period can only be given by a date ante quem rather than an exact start date. However, given the fact that I didn’t note down in each instance (or any, for that matter) just when I began to read a volume, this was always going to be the case. With that repeated dead horse caveat given, I can state that the 100 books read by me were read between June 17, 2015 (approx.) and October 11, 2016. This is a period of 483 days (I include the ending day), giving an average speed of 1 book per 4.83 days.
1 Book per 4.83 Days
Over the past year or so, I’ve engaged in ‘comfort food’ reading, which perhaps explains the dominance of genre fiction among The One Hundred Books. I might have assumed more of an even split between fiction and non-fiction, given my penchant for history reading. (Though perhaps this is merely delusional aspirations towards intellectual pretensions which I will never, could never, achieve.) In fact, fiction overall outnumbered ‘non-‘ by a factor of about 3-to-1. Specifically, 73 fiction books were read while 27 of the ‘other’ category fell beneath my gaze. Of those 73, the preponderance were mysteries, followed by Science Fiction & Fantasy and (some) literature. To be specific:
Books Read by Genre
Mystery 32 SF & Fantasy 24 Literature 17 Nonfiction 27
Or, for those who prefer charts…
Of course, ‘Nonfiction’ as a category categorizes nothing. Especially given the fact that much so-called ‘nonfiction’ actually peddles outright lies and misstates the truth with an almost religious fervor. Fortunately, we can dig deeper due to the diligence of the book database. Here’s how the ‘Nonfiction’ read over the past 100 books breaks down:
Nonfiction Read
Arts & Photography 3 Children’s Books 1 Foreign Language 2 History 3 Humor 5 Indians of North America 1 Mythology & Folklore 3 Philosophy 1 Poetry 1 Politics & Social Sciences 1 Psychology 2 Religion & Spirituality 3 Science & Math 1
Apparently I like funny books, even when I exempt comics from my lists…
Wow, isn’t this analysis fun? What else can we do with the data? Well, we can look at just how each (broad) category was read (since obviously the broken-down ‘Nonfiction’ genre presents too many subcategories and too few data points to be statistically significant). After playing with those bits a bit, normalizing the data (some of which was done earlier without mentioning it before), and then playing and massaging the spreadsheets, we see the following:
From this it appears that I’ve been reading nonfiction (called ‘Other’ in this chart, which is as good a name as any) at a fairly steady rate over this period, while my perusal of mysteries and science fiction increased pretty recently. Also, so-called ‘literature’ has not been part of my reading diet since the summer. Aren’t we flabbergasted with this insight into my reading history?
Truth be told, I’m slightly less than flummoxed by these data insights. I knew already, for instance, that I’d been on what I referred to as a ‘mystery kick’ in my recent reading, so these Moneyball details are somewhat wasted on me. Also, I am troubled by the collapsing of each book’s experience into a point exactly like that of every other book. Nor do I believe that the reductionism objected to here would be relieved by giving some sort of weighting mechanism to account for such metrics as number of pages, average reading level, importance as judged by reviews in major literary critiques, etc. I have actually given a rating for each — which I won’t provide here — but reducing the subjective experience of reading a book to a single (or even multiple!) points on a 5-point or 10-point or 100-point scale seems not only losing proposition, but simply silly.
The problem is similar to that of value in economics, I believe. The question was sidestepped by John von Neumann in his analysis of games in economics by instead using the concept of ‘utility’ — but even this can lead to some treacherous places. In analysis of such mathematical games as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, if the prison sentence is not a term of years but a possible death penalty, how is one to assess a utility for actually dying? (Putting aside the usual pragmatic difficulties related to assessing application vs. theory, which in this case would necessitate evaluating the likelihood of actual execution as well as the time spent in appeals, etc., etc.) The concept of utility has other intractable difficulties as well, as was noted by Walter Otto in the opening remarks of his commentary on Dionysus, wherein he pointed out that taking a utilitarian perspective of religion was akin to reducing the artistic impulse to a question of “Do I need tapestries to make this room more cozy?”
In the case of my reading, I am at a loss to make an assessment of the utility or even the value of this versus that book. Does reading a mystery about a modern Navaho policeman have a measurable ‘value’ which can be compared to that of reading Dante’s Divine Comedy? How does the ‘value’ of such a modern mystery compare to that of an ancient Chinese mystery? Does reading a 1000-year-old Icelandic saga confer more benefit than re-reading The Hobbit? Perhaps such questions are meaningless, or can only be answered by reading the works themselves.
To which end, I present the list of The One Hundred Books. I’ve included the comic books for merely historical interest (ha!), though of course these do not contribute to the running total, the count being given in the first column of each listing. Herewith, The Books:
The One Hundred Books
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
| 1 | 6/17/15 | Martin Gardner | The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener | Philosophy |
| 2 | 6/17/15 | Amir D. Aczel | Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem | Science & Math |
| 3 | 6/17/15 | Fritz Leiber | Swords Against Death | SF/Fantasy |
| 4 | 6/17/15 | Fritz Leiber | Swords and Deviltry | SF/Fantasy |
| 7/21/15 | Weird Love #1 | |||
| 7/21/15 | Popeye #34 | |||
| 7/21/15 | Popeye #13 | |||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Sergio Aragonés Funnies #1 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #6 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #5 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #4 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #3 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #2 | ||
| 7/21/15 | Sergio Aragonés | Groo Friends and Foes #1 | ||
| 7/23/15 | Haunted Horror #5 | |||
| 7/23/15 | Haunted Horror #9 | |||
| 7/24/15 | Sergio Aragones | Groo vs. Conan | ||
| 7/24/15 | Haunted Horror #14 | |||
| 7/25/15 | Dave Sim | Cerebus, Volume 1 | ||
| 5 | 8/6/15 | Roger Price, intro | The MAD Reader | Humor |
| 6 | 8/8/15 | William M. Gaines | The Brothers MAD | Humor |
| 7 | 8/14/15 | Harvey Kurtzman | William M. Gaine’s Inside Mad | Humor |
| 8 | 8/24/15 | Philip Jose Farmer | To Your Scattered Bodies Go | SF/Fantasy |
| 9 | 9/5/15 | John Cohen, ed. | The Essential Lenny Bruce | Humor |
| 10 | 9/11/15 | Alice Miller | The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Revised Edition | Psychology |
| 11 | 9/14/15 | David King | The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia | Arts & Photography |
| 12 | 9/23/15 | Alice Miller | Thou Shalt Not Be Aware | Psychology |
| 13 | 9/27/15 | Douglas Adams | Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency | SF/Fantasy |
| 14 | 9/29/15 | Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss | Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder | Arts & Photography |
| 10/2/15 | The Usual Gang Of Idiots | The MAD Archives Vol. 1 | ||
| 15 | 10/2/15 | Lynd Ward | Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) | Arts & Photography |
| 16 | 10/6/15 | G. K. Chesterton | The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown | Mystery |
| 17 | 10/6/15 | G. K. Chesterton | Four Faultless Felons | Mystery |
| 18 | 10/18/15 | Eustace M. Tillyard | The Elizabethan World Picture | Literature |
| 19 | 10/19/15 | Robert Carter | The Tao and Mother Goose (Quest Book) | Religion |
| 20 | 10/22/15 | Colin Wilson | Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs | History |
| 21 | 10/27/15 | Joscelyn Godwin | Real Rule of Four: The Unauthorized Guide to the New York Times #1 Bestseller | Literature |
| 22 | 10/30/15 | John Carey | Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books | Literature |
| 23 | 11/9/15 | Jorge Luis Borges | Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings | Literature |
| 24 | 11/16/15 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy:Inferno (Galaxy Books) | Literature |
| 25 | 11/27/15 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio (Galaxy Books) | Literature |
| 26 | 12/10/15 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy: Paradiso (Galaxy Books) | Literature |
| 27 | 12/22/15 | P. A. Brunt | Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic | History |
| 28 | 1/18/16 | O. Henry | Great Short Stories | Literature |
| 29 | 1/22/16 | Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason | The Rule of Four | Literature |
| 30 | 1/22/16 | Moliere | The Misanthrope and Tartuffe | Literature |
| 31 | 1/22/16 | Philip K. Dick | The Man in the High Castle | SF/Fantasy |
| 32 | 1/23/16 | George Orwell | Animal Farm | Literature |
| 33 | 2/14/16 | William Morris | Volsunga Saga | Myth/Folklore |
| 34 | 2/18/16 | Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Palsson, trans. | Njal’s Saga | Myth/Folklore |
| 35 | 2/21/16 | W. P. Ker | Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature | Literature |
| 36 | 3/3/16 | Michael Alexander | A History of Old English Literature (Broadview Literary Texts) | Literature |
| 37 | 3/6/16 | Norman Spinrad | Bug Jack Barron | SF/Fantasy |
| 38 | 3/10/16 | C.M. Kornbluth | A Mile Beyond the Moon | SF/Fantasy |
| 39 | 3/13/16 | Philip K. Dick | Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said | SF/Fantasy |
| 40 | 3/14/16 | Camille Paglia | Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems | Literature |
| 41 | 3/20/16 | Jules Verne | De la Terre à la Lune | Foreign Language |
| 42 | 3/22/16 | J.R.R. Tolkien | The Hobbit | SF/Fantasy |
| 43 | 3/28/16 | The pulps: Fifty years of American pop culture | Literature | |
| 44 | 3/30/16 | Charles Baudelaire | Paris Spleen (New Directions Paperbook) | Poetry |
| 45 | 3/31/16 | Victor Koman | The Jehovah Contract | SF/Fantasy |
| 46 | 4/15/16 | Tony Hillerman | The Blessing Way | Mystery |
| 47 | 4/17/16 | The Best American Noir of the Century | Mystery | |
| 48 | 4/20/16 | Erle Stanley Gardner | The Case of the Curious Bride | Mystery |
| 49 | 4/21/16 | Smedley D. Butler | War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier | Politics |
| 50 | 4/21/16 | Isaac Asimov | Before the Golden Age Book 3 | SF/Fantasy |
| 51 | 4/24/16 | Mark Riebling | Church of Spies | History |
| 52 | 4/25/16 | Michael Moorcock | Elric of Melnibone | SF/Fantasy |
| 53 | 4/27/16 | Michael Moorcock | A Sailor on the Seas of Fate | SF/Fantasy |
| 54 | 4/28/16 | Harry Harrison | Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers | SF/Fantasy |
| 55 | 4/29/16 | Michael Moorcock | The Weird of the White Wolf | SF/Fantasy |
| 56 | 4/30/16 | Michael Moorcock | The Vanishing Tower | SF/Fantasy |
| 57 | 5/3/16 | Michael Moorcock | The Bane of the Black Sword | SF/Fantasy |
| 58 | 5/5/16 | Tony Hillerman | Talking God | Mystery |
| 5/8/26 | Harischandra: The Story of the Mythological King Whose Name is Synonymous With Truth | |||
| 5/9/26 | Uncle Scrooge (Walt Disney best comics series) | |||
| 59 | 5/9/16 | James Hadley Chase | I’ll Bury My Dead | Mystery |
| 60 | 5/10/16 | Isaac Asimov | Before the Golden Age Book 1 | SF/Fantasy |
| 61 | 5/12/16 | Michael Moorcock | Stormbringer | SF/Fantasy |
| 62 | 5/16/16 | Ben Bova, ed. | The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIA | SF/Fantasy |
| 63 | 5/18/16 | John Sladek | Black Aura | Mystery |
| 64 | 5/19/16 | Robert van Gulik, trans. | Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An) | Mystery |
| 65 | 5/20/16 | John Meade Falkner | The Lost Stradivarius | Literature |
| 66 | 5/23/16 | Robert van Gulik | The Haunted Monastery and the Chinese Maze Murders | Mystery |
| 67 | 5/25/16 | Carl Fallberg | Walt Disney’s Donald Duck The Fabulous Diamond Fountain | Children’s |
| 68 | 5/25/16 | Robert van Gulik | The Monkey and the Tiger: Two Chinese Detective Stories | Mystery |
| 5/27/16 | Disney Studios Staff | Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and the Golden Helmet | ||
| 5/30/16 | William Messner-Loebs & Sam Kieth | Epicurus the Sage, Volume I | ||
| 5/30/16 | William Messner-Loebs & Sam Kieth | Epicurus the Sage: The Many Loves of Zeus | ||
| 5/30/16 | Gardner Fox | The Golden Age Sandman – Archives, Volume 1 (DC Archive Editions) | ||
| 69 | 5/31/16 | Philip K. Dick | Now Wait for Last Year | SF/Fantasy |
| 70 | 6/14/16 | Edmund Crispin | Love Lies Bleeding | Mystery |
| 71 | 6/18/16 | William Shakespeare | As You Like it | Literature |
| 6/19/16 | Howard the Duck #1 | |||
| 6/19/16 | Al Moore | 1963 – Book Five: Horus God of Light | ||
| 6/19/16 | R. Crumb | Despair | ||
| 6/20/16 | Howard the Duck #2 | |||
| 6/20/16 | Howard the Duck #33 | |||
| 6/20/16 | Howard the Duck Annual #1 | |||
| 6/21/16 | Steve Gerber | Destroyer Duck #1 | ||
| 72 | 6/21/16 | John Mortimer | Rumpole of the Bailey | Mystery |
| 73 | 6/23/16 | Poul Anderson | Ensign Flandry | SF/Fantasy |
| 74 | 6/25/16 | Poul Anderson | A Circus of Hells | SF/Fantasy |
| 75 | 6/26/16 | Robert van Gulik | Judge Dee at Work | Mystery |
| 76 | 6/29/16 | Bartholomew Gill | McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher | Mystery |
| 7/3/26 | Al Moore | 1963 – Book One: Mystery Incorporated | ||
| 7/4/26 | Al Moore | 1963 – Book Two: The Fury | ||
| 77 | 7/5/16 | Rex Stout | Three Doors to Death | Mystery |
| 7/6/26 | Al Moore | 1963 – Book Three: Tales of the Uncanny | ||
| 78 | 7/6/16 | Raymond Chandler | Pickup on Noon Street | Mystery |
| 7/6/26 | Al Moore | 1963 – Book Four: Tales From Beyond | ||
| 79 | 7/8/16 | Michael Gilbert | The Killing of Katie Steelstock | Mystery |
| 80 | 7/11/16 | Robert J. Ray | Murdock for Hire | Mystery |
| 81 | 7/16/16 | Benjamin Hoff | The Tao of Pooh | Religion |
| 82 | 7/21/16 | Georges Simenon | L’Ami De’Enfance De Maigret | Foreign Language |
| 83 | 7/30/16 | Isaac Asimov, ed. | Before The Golden Age | SF/Fantasy |
| 84 | 8/2/16 | Sabine Baring-Gould | Curious Myths of the Middle Ages: The Sangreal, Pope Joan, The Wandering Jew, and Others | Myth/Folklore |
| 85 | 8/7/16 | R. Austin Freeman | The Best Dr. Thorndyke Stories | Mystery |
| 86 | 8/11/16 | Jim Thompson | The Golden Gizmo | Mystery |
| 87 | 8/13/16 | Tobias Wells | Murder Most Fouled Up | Mystery |
| 88 | 8/16/16 | Alan Watts | Tao: The Watercourse Way | Religion |
| 89 | 9/9/16 | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) | Mystery |
| 90 | 9/12/16 | Arthur William Upfield | The Will of the Tribe | Mystery |
| 91 | 9/15/16 | Anne Hillerman | Rock with Wings | Mystery |
| 92 | 9/19/16 | Tony Hillerman | Dance Hall of the Dead | Mystery |
| 93 | 9/21/16 | W.C. Sellar & R. J. Yeatman | 1066 and All That | Humor |
| 94 | 9/22/16 | Tony Hillerman | Listening Woman | Mystery |
| 95 | 9/23/16 | Tony Hillerman | People of Darkness | Mystery |
| 96 | 9/26/16 | Tony Hillerman | The Dark Wind | Mystery |
| 97 | 9/27/16 | Tony Hillerman | The Ghostway | Mystery |
| 98 | 9/29/16 | Tony Hillerman | Skinwalkers | Mystery |
| 99 | 10/8/16 | Frank Waters | Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism | Indians of North America |
| 100 | 10/11/16 | Tony Hillerman | A Thief of Time | Mystery |
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