For many years, I’ve used Goodreads to track my reading, including well before they were owned by Amazon. As is typically the case for me, I’ve deleted and recreated my account there many times over the years, with the most recent being just a couple of years ago when I decided to recreate it and set a yearly reading goal. That happened in the summer and still resulted in reading 23 books. Last year I set a fairly ambitious goal of 30 books and ended up reading 41. This year? Well… life happens.
The Goal
This year I started off with a goal of reading 30 books. Last year I read 41 books, and I figured I’d would add a bit of wiggle-room in case I got too busy to read as much as I had the previous year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t predict exactly how busy I would end up being. While I still put in some decent reading, my backlog has only continued to grow. In fact, I’m currently in the middle of reading 4 different books. While this may seem like a lack of planning on my part, the fact of the matter is that I’m reading a lot of different books for different purposes. I have an ebook I’m reading for pleasure, an ebook I’m reading for work, and then two different physical books (one at my apartment and one at my significant other’s apartment.) That certainly adds to how long it takes to finish a book when:
- I sometimes go for a week without touching a given book.
- When I pick a book back up, I often have to do a little research to remember exactly what was happening when I left off.
Overall, I’d like to make more consistent progress next year in my reading, so hopefully I can find a bit of a better strategy.
The Results
The results weren’t terrible, but I’m certainly not thrilled with the outcome.
13 books isn’t awful, it isn’t certainly not good. As past years would indicate, I can clearly do a lot better. Next year I’d love to be able to focus a little bit better on making reading more of a regular part of my routine versus having random days where I read an entire novel followed by weeks of not touching a book.
I did find some of my metrics a bit interesting, though:
Out of the books I read, Sea of Tranquility was the most shelved while The Book of Kubernetes was the least shelved. Out of everything I read, Sea of Tranquility was my personal favorite. I read it because the author, Emily St. John Mandel, wrote Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility kept up the same level of quality, intrigue, and emotional impact. It’s overall a terrific read for literally anyone who likes fiction.
However, I found it interesting that my least-shelved book was also the highest rated overall:
To a degree, this makes sense to me. A book like this one, which I thought was incredibly good, is somewhat more objective than a work of fiction; either it teaches the reader about the topic at hand or it doesn’t. In my case, I came away from The Book of Kubernetes feeling much stronger in K8s than I did beforehand. With fiction, things get much more subjective, and ratings tend to be much more askew. Regardless, if you want to learn a thing or two about Kubernetes, I can’t recommend this title enough.
Overall, I read some really great books in 2023, but I’m going to leave the year feeling disappointed that I didn’t get more reading done. I’ll have a head start in 2024 with all of the books that I’m partially done with right at the moment, but I’m hopefully that I’ll be able to make reading more regular part of my routine again.