What I have read in the past 25 years and how I know

On the first day of January 2000 I started to write down, in a small notebook, the books that I read and by the end of that year I had 224 entries. I cannot now understand why I did this or what purpose I thought it would serve. I am pretty certain that when I started I didn’t expect that one day I would be sitting down to begin recording my twenty-fifth year of reading – it seems now to be a habit that I can’t stop.

I have, therefore, a collection of notebooks of various sizes and shapes containing list of books read in each year. Some notebooks have more than one year of books in them depending on their size. As the years have gone on I have used nicer notebooks and changed some of what I record but the basics have remained the same – title, author and genre. The number of entries for each year has varied too – in 2000 it was 224 which is the lowest figure for a year with 2012 having the highest at 597.

I have considered going high tech and using a spreadsheet but I like the convenience and the continuity of using notebooks which I can carry around with me and which only need a pen to complete. I think that I am less likely to forget to record the book. At one stage I did enter my reading into a spreadsheet as well but that seems to have disappeared from my computer which is a pity as it was much easier to search on it. I have entered the novels I have read into the Fantastic Fiction website (see here) so that I can look them up when I am book shopping to ensure that I don’t buy a book I have already read – there are over 5,600 different titles now recorded under my account on that site and that ignores non-fiction and rereads.

I love my little notebooks and I enjoy recording what I have read and totalling it all up at the end of the year. I also use the notebooks to make sure that I review all the books that I want to by entering some strange hieroglyphics that only I understand.

One of the interesting things for me about social media has been discovering other people that also record their reading and count their books – I had thought that it was a particular quirk of mine. Most of them seem to use Goodreads or Storygraph but I am still sticking to my hand written lists, at least for the moment. I have discovered that there are some people, but not very many, who read as many books as I do and also that a lot of people doubt the totals of those of us who read a lot. I can only say that I think that I read the books carefully and I certainly don’t speed read them.

As 2024 marks the twenty-fifth year of continuous recording I thought I would celebrate it by blogging throughout this year about what I find when I revisit each year’s reading notebook. What genre did I read most of ? When did I start reading more adventurously ? Can I actually remember all the books I have recorded ? How many are new books and how many are rereads ? Why might I have read more books in one year and fewer in another ? What, if anything, does the notebook tell me about my reading diet and my life as a reader ?

If I have 24 lists to look at that means that I’ll be writing two blogs per month – one about each year. I’ll use the same picture on the blog so that you can see that it belongs to this series. I wonder what I’ll find. Meanwhile, I shall be reading and recording my 2024 books as well and writing reviews for them. I hope it will be interesting.

Keep reading…I will ….