A 2023 New Years’ Resolution that I’m not repeating was my resolution to read 52 books (a book a week). I had been an inveterate reader from a young age, often winning the summer book-reading challenges at our public library. But as an adult, as with many of you, I expect, smartphones in general and social media in particular cannibalized the time I’d spent reading books.
In 2022, I realized that Twitter had so weakened my reading attention span that it was taking forever to read the nonfiction books I used to love. I’d read 19 books in 2021, and just 13 books in 2022. Given my four shelves of unread books, a New Year’s resolution to read a book a week seemed the right approach. I started by literally sorting the books by page count and reading the shortest books I had first!
That worked great. What I then found was that I had grown tired of nonfiction. Fiction, on the other hand, got me turning the pages, reading more than I meant to each day, to find out what happened next.
My other reading management change was to no longer feel as guilty about stopping reading a book I dislike. Slogging on had become such a bottleneck to my reading that it made me miserable. I gave myself permission to purposefully skim nonfiction books that previously I would have read all of. By design, I didn’t finish every book I “read” last year. Some were reference books, and I read the parts that interested me. One had sexual violence, and I set it aside.
With this relaxed approach, I did meet my challenge of reading all or most of 52 books last year. I’m using GoodReads to log my books at the moment, but eyeing Bookwyrm. Here are my 2023 books. I blogged about the Earthsea series and The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book.
Given last year’s reading of the shorter books, this year I do have many much longer books on my “to be read” shelves. Still, somehow, I have four shelves of unread books, since my book-buying hobby is often independent of my book-reading hobby! As a result, this year I’m going to read 26 books instead of 52 (one book each fortnight).
First up, a re-read of Apocalypse World 2nd edition, for our next campaign.
Happy reading!
2024 Recap
I ended up beating my 2024 goal, reading 33 books vs. a target of 26. Some of them are for a future blog post [update: Hugo-Award Winning Novels].
Weird factoids, courtesy of GoodReads:
- The shortest book I read was The Grand Kentucky Junction, at 96 pages, and the longest was Dune, at 658 pages. (Average length: 329 pages.)
- The most-read book I read was The Fellowship of the Ring (which 4.1 million other people read) and the least-read book was Akrotiri, Santorini: The Biography of a Lost City (which one other person read).
- Fellowship was the highest rated book I read, at 4.67 stars, and I gave an average rating of 3.7 stars.
- I read a mixture of history, science-fiction, and fantasy.
I decided to keep the same resolution for 2025, though: a book a fortnight.
2025 Recap
I resolved to read 24 books in 2025 and read 48 (oops?!), completing my reading of the past 15 years of Hugo-Award Winners.
I started listening to the Clarkesworld podcast in May then switched to the print edition in July (6 of those 48 “books” I read last year are its magazines, but given their word count these are like anthologies; the January 2026 issue had a word count of 56,000 words). You can read stories from back issues for free.
I read all of The Murderbot Diaries and re-read the first book, All Systems Red, after watching the new TV series.
Oh, and I read a new-to-me translation of Gilgamesh, by Stephen Mitchell, which ended up being one of my favorite books I read last year.
My other 5-star reviews were for All Systems Red, James, Some Desperate Glory, Star Trek: Lower Decks―Warp Your Own Way, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
