{"id":4056,"date":"2023-02-25T10:02:29","date_gmt":"2023-02-25T18:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/?p=4056"},"modified":"2023-02-25T10:02:29","modified_gmt":"2023-02-25T18:02:29","slug":"900-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/?p=4056","title":{"rendered":"900 Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-scaled.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-734x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"893\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-4058\" srcset=\"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-734x1024.jpeg 734w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-215x300.jpeg 215w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-768x1072.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-1101x1536.jpeg 1101w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-1468x2048.jpeg 1468w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-1568x2188.jpeg 1568w, https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Hapax-scaled.jpeg 1835w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"prose\">Yesterday I finished my 900th book, counting back from the time when my wife gave me a barcode scanner and a book database and I started keeping track of such things, back in 2015.<\/p>\n<p><p class=\"prose\">My 900th book (as usual discounting comic books and graphic novels from my &#8216;official&#8217; count, of which I&#8217;ve read some 118 (at last count)) was an early (almost her earliest) book of poetry from the acclaimed poet of Decatur, Athens, and Athens, A. E. Stallings: <em>Hapax<\/em>. I&#8217;ve liked Stallings&#8217;s work since I stumbled upon her poem &#8220;Alice, Bewildered&#8221; at the Poetry Foundation website\u2014they no longer &#8216;carry&#8217; it, but you can read it (as of today, 25 February 2023) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vqronline.org\/poetry\/2015\/10\/alice-bewildered\">here<\/a>. Alice, of course, is one of my favorite characters from literature, and shows up as a guise of the poet in several of her works. (Her initial initial &#8216;A.&#8217; hides the name Alicia, which is cognate, I suppose. I have no idea if she keeps the initials in homage to Housman, or for the usual reason, or if she just likes Russian style.) The book <em>Hapax<\/em> is a mixed bag, showing the poet trying to find her punctilious style. I liked the autobiographical section in the beginning the best, though I may just be prejudiced by my own foolish fulsome nostalgia for the South that is no more and likely never was. It&#8217;s a good book of poetry all through however; Joe Bob says check it out.<\/p>\n<p\/>\n<p class=\"prose\">In this last set of a hundred books, once again, I&#8217;ve been reading a lot\u2014a whole lot\u2014of mysteries. Almost half of these books (as usual, setting aside the comic books and graphic novels I read) were in the Mystery &#038; Thriller genre. Partly this is acause I&#8217;m reading most of my books at work, during my lunch, and that means light reading. Partly it&#8217;s because the deeper books take longer to read, maybe. [All of this paragraph up to now was simply copied from my last report on reading my 800th book.]<\/p>\n<p\/>\n<p class=\"prose\">My reading pace was about the same as for the previous century of books: 258 days to read this last hundred, compared to 259 days for the set before. I see upon examination that I have not only <strong>not<\/strong> done any analysis of my previous set of hundred books read, I haven&#8217;t even given you the list! I&#8217;ll try to make that up to you over my weekend, which will start tomorrow<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-size:x-large;background-color: lightgray; margin-left: 50px; width: 50%; text-align: center;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1 Book per 2.58 Days&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"prose\">Hoping to hit you soon with some real data, some real book lists&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p\/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I finished my 900th book, counting back from the time when my wife gave me a barcode scanner and a book database and I started keeping track of such things, back in 2015. My 900th book (as usual discounting comic books and graphic novels from my &#8216;official&#8217; count, of which I&#8217;ve read some 118 &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/?p=4056\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;900 Books&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[87,92],"class_list":["post-4056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-books","tag-data","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatedguesswork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}