Scoring One Hundred
I read one hundred books this year — not by accident, only sort-of on purpose. What happened is, I thought I’d keep track….I know I read a lot, and wanted a raw number. I own a lot of books, and I bought more. I love libraries and bookstores and am surrounded by friends who read. I have a long commute, I travel for work and for fun. I was pretty sure I read about a hundred books a year, and decided to see if that was true. Mostly, I decided to do more of what I like, and that’s the lesson here.
Other takeaways, that came mostly as surprises:
My library. You guys, my library is such a gem. There is a ‘Lucky Day’ shelf with new releases with no wait. The ‘LIBBY’ app (for any library) has thousands of audio titles, and my library (yay) has a ‘Lucky Day’ list on LIBBY. The librarians know me by name, and pull my reserved books as soon as they see me. Of course there are outreach programs for kids and seniors and everyone in between, classes and lectures, and free WiFi (that they pumped out to the parking lot and lawn during COVID). My neighbor called across the street to me this fall, ‘next time you’re at the library, look for my art!’ — she’d taken a class and her drawings were on display. Some wingnutty elected officials tried to shut down the library this year (tbh, they are still trying but look extra-foolish now because the cost of closing library and sending us all elsewhere is more than keeping it open, but they are righty-right-right (you know how they get) so they keep on with their ill-conceived plan.) Anyhow, h/t to my library.
(Shout-out to library patrons, too. Just this month, a man stopped me and asked if I’d read a certain book. I hadn’t. I recommended one of my faves to him in return. Of note: mystery readers are a different breed; they have strong feelings about their detectives/PIs/investigators. Then, when I was at check-out, the librarian said, ‘did you guys just swap book titles?’. Yes, I said. And she was delighted as only a librarian can be about witnessing that exchange.)
Libro dot fm. If you listen to your books, please use this app. You can choose to have your purchases attributed to a local bookstore (you pick your bookshop, or the app aligns you with an organization that helps local bookstores). It’s easy and keeps your book purchase monies in your community. If you currently use another app, you don’t lose your existing library; you just build a new library over at Libro. Five stars. (Alternately, if you want to build an actual library, thriftbooks dot com is an excellent source for used titles.)
Local bookseller love. So, I have a favorite bookshop, and she knows me and gives me recs and asks me about what I’m reading. No joke, everyone got books from her shop from me, for birthdays and Christmas and any other occasion that warranted book-giving. Props to her for opening her dream bookstore, in a small town in Wisconsin, then surviving through COVID, supporting local authors, curating book selections, and hosting events. Basically being exactly the neighbor you’d want.
Other readers. Ask your reader friends what they are reading, and what they like. I was pretty new to the mystery genre (other than classic Agatha Christies years back), and guidance from other readers lead me to some pretty great finds. (There is a whole psychology about reading mysteries, especially when you’re stressed. You can be engaged, but not have to figure it all out. It’s low stakes, high reward, and often you DO figure it out first, which is the little ego-boost we all need.) I also listened to books about philosophy (by the writer of “The Good Place”, so you can imagine how that unfolded), and about music (here’s where audio truly shines), and dense long-winded tomes that in reality I would have found daunting but on audio I was all in. Normally not good with Holocaust stories, reader-friends gently nudged me to “The Postcard” which might be the best book I read this year.
Other genres. I would not have picked up a book about the end of the world, had my future daughter-in-law not commented that seeing “The Power” on my bookshelf let her know we’d get along great. When that author released “The Future”, I leapt. It was completely new for me, and now I look for people who read it. I’m not sure it’s the genre for me, but man, that book was something else entirely; I was quite antisocial until I finished it. Similarly, I don’t know that I would have read books from Mexico or India or France, or that I liked firsthand historical accounts — fictionalized or not. I certainly would not have picked up a book featuring an octopus as the narrator, or another featuring a talking dog. But I did.
Real-time relevance. I will be unpacking my Civil Rights trip to Mississippi for some time to come, but while I was there, I bought books about nearly every site we visited, by and about the people tied to the Mississippi Summer Project we were immersed in studying. Mostly, I bought via thriftbooks, and my spouse back home would text me that our rural mailbox looked like a Little Free Library until he emptied it of my purchases. But sometimes, I bought books on site, and read them in the car as we moved to our next stop. I bought a book in Natchez, about Natchez, and started reading exerpts to my colleague who was driving. I realized I was probably overwhelming him with Natchez lore, so I stopped, and (bless him) he said, ‘you could keep reading that aloud you know’. I was, and am still, engrossed in Freedom Summer history, where one story leads to another and another.
Food. Reading is followed closely by cooking for my favorite passtimes at home. I have strong aversion to online food-blogs that lose the recipe in the unnecessary narrative but I have huge love for cookbooks that tell stories, or stories that include recipes. Shout-out to Nora Ephron for perfecting that balance. In my one-hundred-books-read this year tally, I did not factor some really terrific cookbooks, but I turned to “Don’t Panic Pantry”, “Pie School”, “Midnight Chicken”, “Eat Joy”, and “Feed These People” on the regular. I promise, my reading about food truly benefits the people who eat my cooking.
Text group-chats. Bless reader friends, who create text-groups just for book reviews and recs. Looking at you ‘The Katies’ (everyone in the group is named Katie except me….the title fits.), who frequently are like, ‘read this so we can talk about it!’ in their texts. We have discussions about Kindle and audio and physical books, and once this fall when one Katie thought she left her Kindle behind when she was on a (kind of remote) vaca, we strategized how we could maybe break in to her house and FedEx it to her. Get yourself reader-friends who are unafraid to get your damn books to you. Sidebar: we have conducted research (on ourselves) on how many books to bring on weekend trips — you know: the current book, the next book, the backup book, and the other book in case you’re not feeling the backup book. The answer is four, bring four books for a weekend. You are welcome for that key info. Also, these are the friends who will tell you, it’s not how many books you read, it’s the kind of books you read that matters. And the ‘kind of books’ in that scenario equates to books that challenge you, or calm you, or make you think/cry/laugh/wish. The feelings matter.
Time. There’s always downtime. Sometimes anticipated, sometimes not. And that’s when you want a book. Bless friends who are cool with you reading on their couch, being silent and welcoming to you and your unbreakable habit. I travel for work, often on buses, and time flies with a good book. In my own car driving highway miles, or waiting in doctor offices, or just waiting for dinner to cook, present opportunities to move the bookmark (physical or audio) to the next chapter. There were many days I arrived at work and sat in the parking lot listening to a book, waiting for a ‘good stopping point’.
I don’t know if I’ll keep keeping track of books-read. Maybe. My whole Instagram looks like a bookstore, and that’s cool but I am more than just a bibliophile. For now, I’ll let the data stand: I am many things to many people but anyone who knows me well will tell you, I’m a reader.
TLDR: do more of what you like. Amen.
