1000 books

If I ranked my decades by the amount of books I read, it would probably be

1. my thirties
2. my twenties
3. my teens
4. the first ten years
5. my forties

However, if I ranked my decades by the amount of books I bought, it would be

1. my forties
2. my thirties
3. my twenties
4. my teens
5. the first ten years

Can you see the problem? I buy more books than I read.

Covid didn’t help. I panicked about the future of the independent book industry and subscribed to all of my favourite publishers. At the same time, from the first day of lockdown to the last, I read nothing. Cabin fever and home schooling really sapped me of my brain power. I couldn’t focus on the page. I watched every episode of Doc Martin and every episode of Vera and every episode of New Tricks, even though it really dropped in quality once James Bolam left. I think we watched Suits. Looking for a hit of Alun Armstrong after the end of New Tricks, I found a show on Netflix called Frontier which was mostly about Jason Momoa punching his way across the wilderness of pre-independence Canada, lots of fun and possibly historically inaccurate.

The main problem though is I don’t just sit down and read like I used to. Which is a shame because I like books and I like reading.

What if I read more books? What if I read two a week?

[Importantly, when I say two books, I’m including pamphlets, poetry collections, single story editions, graphic novels and picture books as books. Realistically, I’m not going to read a Victorian novel every three days. Though I may read the occasional Victorian novel.]

The other thing I want to do is re-read books. One of the problems of having a large to-read pile is the (false) obligation to read something new instead of revisiting an old favourite. That stops now.

As with the one thousand species of animal I am hoping to see and the thousand trips to the cinema I’m hoping to make, I’ll eventually get round to setting up a page on here so you can track my progress. I’ll update it less often though because as we work our way through the last fifty years I will be writing about my favourite books from each year. I don’t want to tip you off to what those books might be in advance. So the earliest you are going to get an update will be the 29th of September, by which time I hope to have read a book.