Numberless Dreams

I read more than 100 books in a year for the first time in 2023, with a grand total of 125. 2024 looks to be the second year I pass that mark: 102 books read so far, plus a few I forgot to record on Goodreads.

Sounds impressive, right? As a culture, we seem obsessed with quantifying our activities, and big round numbers (100, 1,000, etc.) are the ones deemed worth celebrating. Just look at all those zeros!

But what if I said that 37 of the books were audio books? Or that 11 of the books were picture books? Or that I didn’t actually finish 7 of the books, just finished more than half and rounded up? Or that 13 were comics or manga or illustrated short stories? Do they all still “count”? And why do big numbers matter, in the end? Looking back on the list for this year, I can barely remember what some of the books were about. (I want to say, “They went in one eye and out the other,” but that doesn’t have quite the same ring as “in one ear and out the other.”)

I often think that “my eyes are bigger than my free time,” a play on “my eyes are bigger than my stomach.” I feel greedy for words, for the experiences promised by books. There’s so much out there that I want to read, even if they’re not all worth the time I spend on them. Some, like audio books, can be helpful distractions that make the walk I didn’t want to take or the cleaning I didn’t want to do a bit easier. But others contribute to a habit of “virtuous” procrastination I’d like to stamp out: I couldn’t possibly do any writing right now! I have to finish this book before it’s due back at the library.

Out of the 100+ books I read this year, these were the ones I got the most out of reading (in order of date read):

1. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (historical fiction)
2. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (nonfiction)
3. Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend (memoir)
4. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (historical fiction)
5. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (mystery)
6. The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa Ramirez (nonfiction)
7. Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft by Brooks Landon (nonfiction)
8. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman (nonfiction)
9. At the Mountains of Madness, Volumes I and II, by H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Francois Baranger (horror)
10. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf (nonfiction)
11. Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson (memoir)

My friend Sabrina recently recommended The Read Well podcast, which has the tagline “It’s better to read well than to be well read.” In the first few episodes, Eddy Hood talks about the challenges of slowing down and focusing on a book and then doing something with the information you’ve acquired (such as writing an essay) that adds to the conversation about a particular topic. I ended up buying my own copies of some library books I read this year, including Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon, with the intention of rereading them in order to take notes. I wanted to explore the ideas they discuss more deeply–after all, it’s hard to write things down when you’re listening to a book while driving. Here’s hoping. I’m also going to scale my reading goal back from 75 to 52 books for 2025. I don’t want to feel that I have to read books just to finish them.

At the same time, I want to use 2025 to start clearing the overflowing shelves taken up by my to-be-read pile, which grows every year because most of the books I read come from the library. I likely won’t read or finish all of them (there are somewhere around 150 books), but I want to give most of them a shot. So I’m cut off from reserving books at the library until that’s done. This is a resolution that has quickly fallen by the wayside in the past, so I need to make better use of the “For Later” button on the library’s website.

What are your 2025 reading goals? How did you finish out 2024?