Happy New Year, now the count begins again. Despite my love of books I haven’t always read that much. I started keeping track in November of 1982 shortly after reading an Agatha Christie mystery for the second time and not realizing it until the big reveal at the end. Upon writing them all down I started counting. 1983, the first complete year recorded was 13. In the eighties the top was 20 and the lowest 5. The nineties were almost completely in the single digits except for a 13 and a year with 17. I don’t know what I was doing in 1995, but there were only 3.

By 2000 my indexing in the back of the journal and the journal itself was filling up so I had to start another. Still it wasn’t until 2014 that I broke out of the ingle digits with 12 that year, which seems like a reasonable goal I set for most of the years, even those where I fell very short. In 2013 I started counting audio books which I increasing listened to thanks to many hours on the road for my work. 2021 I recorded that I didn’t listen to any books. 2020 my traveling for work ended due to COVID19 and I read 16 books, a number only matched or exceeded three times before.

I track pages too. I read a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction and some books are very short and others very long. Years range from a low of 300 to 4,371. Both the number of books and the number of pages were beaten in 2022 with 30 books for a total of 7680 pages. they were:

• Along the Maine Coast, by Dorothy Mitchell
• Tales from Watershiip Down, by Richard Adams
• Tales of the Maine Coast, by Noah Brooks (1894)
• Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, by Edward Waldo Emerson
• Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Lucy Crawford’s History of the White Mountains, edited by Stearns Morse
• The St. Lawrence, by Henry Beston
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, by Dylan Thomas
• This Very Ground, This Crooked Affair: A Mennonite Homestead on Lenape Land, by John Ruth
• Nature Addresses and Lectures, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Way of Nature, by Zhuangzi
• A Fugitive in Walden Woods, by Norman Lock
• The Colonial Printer, by Lawrence Wroth
• Adam Ramage and His Presses, by Milton Hamilton
• A Yankee in Canada, by Henry David Thoreau
• Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe
• Murder at Monticello, by Jane Langton
• The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman
• Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens
• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed
• The Weir, by Ruth Moore
• Farnsy, byWilliam Anthony
• They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei
• The Pencil, by Henry Petroski
• The Midcoast: A Novel, by Adam White
• The Saint Adventurers of the Virginia Frontier, by Klaus Wust
• Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks
• Northbound with Theo, by Soren West
• Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty