Tag: Reading

modified from *Photo by Sijmen van Hooff on Unsplash*

The past couple of days, the Youtube Algorithm has been extremely insistent that I want to watch this specific video:

A quick-and-Dougly summation for those who can’t/won’t watch: Hidden Rabbits was trying to find out how to read more books and stumbled upon a discourse/debate about folks skipping most of the books [in this case, just reading dialogue but I have heard of other techniques] and uses that as a lever to pry open issues with reading goals. Ultimately, Hidden Rabbits takes the stance of reading goals are good, being too hard on yourself is bad, some people are just better readers, and only reading dialogue is objectively bad. A few other tidbits ramble here or there in his discourse.

Books and I

Now this is something that sparked a LOT of thoughts in my head because I have been part of the online-book-sphere before there was a -Tok or a -Tube to fast-track the labeling process.¹ I have seen the same arguments repeat forever like the whole thing is just an expression of liminal horror.

Perhaps most germane to all this is I sold books for years before becoming a librarian for nearly two decades (and, initially, had planned to retire as one before the international move).

I have had somewhere in the easy triple digits of people (frankly, probably easy quadruple digits of people) come up to chat with me in person about books, have attended formal lectures. All that. And a topic which echoes from grad school to the book store to the informal gathering has been “the right way to read.”

Ebooks? Reading goals? Young adult fiction? Graphic novels? Books over certain reading levels? Is The Lord of the Rings a book for children?² All variations of that theme. How do we judge the way some people read as being right or wrong while largely forgiving ourselves for our own reading sins?

I’m now a bit past those days but it is a good to refresh myself every now and then so I want to riff off some points but FIRST an absolute CAVEAT: I think Hidden Rabbits bounces back and forth a lot and ends up into some rough waters here or there which are sometimes at odds with other things he says. There’s bits about some people having more free time. About the pretention of certain books. About the comparative “weight” of chunky fantasy vs thin (?) non-fiction. Stuff about owning books and whatever. It feels a bit freeform.

I link not because I agree (or disagree) with it but because I always appreciate when people talk about stuff like this even if I come from a different place than them.

SECOND, a less-binding CAVEAT: I generally consider a lot of the machinations of Social Media + Books to be ultimately a problem rather than a solution.³ I am not here to condemn BookTok (-etc) and I am sure there are many people that have found a wonderful community but in my experience you cannot have a gathering of readers without paradoxically generating what is effectively an anti-intellectual/anti-literary discourse.

I cannot explain it it just seems to bend that way.

The [Not Precisely] Wrong Way to Read

There is a bit where he says he doesn’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but…

Frankly, I would have stopped my sentence before the but and not tried to buckle down with establishing an objective measure of any wrong way to read.

Reading is a conversation between content creator and content consumer and what makes it so interesting is there exists such a wide sea of possibility even for relatively plain reading. A person who comes across Lord of the Flies as a teen will likely be seeing, and should be seeing, a different novel than a person who reads it in old age. You start to understand it is barely a book about kids on an island at all.

That sea is real danged complicated. There is no precisely correct path to navigate it.

The only real problem I would have with “incorrect reading” — be it dialogue-only or only reading the first few sentences of each page/paragraph and all the other skimming methods — is when you are dishonest about this in order to try and hold some reading-superiority over others.

Beyond that, the notion of “the wrong way to read” ends up being a conversation stopper rather than starter. Like Hidden Rabbits says: some read slower or faster. To add to that, some read deeper or shallower. Some are unable to process fiction or non-fiction as well as the other. Et cetera.

By all means, make guidelines for what you do and do not want to do while reading. That is fine.

Just it was not too terribly long ago where people felt that audiobooks weren’t reading and by “too terribly long ago” I mean people still have this argument. See also ebooks. Certain genres. Certain print formats.

Extreme example but what about a person who reads classics by randomizing the order of chapters and livestreams the experience of re-interpreting the book?⁴ That seems…interesting. Maybe thought provoking. But it completely violates the standard shape of reading.

A more pervasive example might be all the ways book consumption has been turned into content creation.

Going back to dialogue-only reading [which I doubt is all that common despite seeing at least two videos decrying it], it makes me think of graphic novels. Graphic novels have LONG been established an effective way to reach reluctant readers. A coincidence? Maaaybe.

There is simply no good way to draw a line even if I think many readers feel like there should be a line. I have styles of reading that do not interest me. I’m sure most of us do.

The best I can say is let reading meet you where you are currently. Cast a wide net into that sea of possibility.

Let other people mind their own boats.

Reading Goals vs Reading Schedules

The other main point I want to talk about is reading goals. I’ve talked about them, before. I have my own reading tally here on this blog which is badly out of date. I guess I should fix that. Anyhow.

Reading goals can help certain people.

Like Hidden Rabbits says, though, it can be easy to slip out of alignment with them. Or to use various “tricks” to hit and exceed them.

My recommendation if you are struggling with reading goals is to instead try something like a “Reading Schedule”.

Rather than trying to read 30-50 books (whatever) per year, just make time on a daily basis to read. You can either set a length (e.g., one chapter) or time (e.g., 30 minutes) as a goal but the idea is to give yourself some flexibility and to just get used to daily reading as a habit.

I think annual reading goals almost encourages treat reading like an assignment and like an assignment we end up front loading a bit, taking a long gap, and then trying to rush at the end.

Reading schedules are more like a mental exercise.

The Truth about Reading More

I maybe should have started with this but here is a quick concept that explains the stupidly frustrating truth about reading more in a way that is almost definitely unhelpful to anyone finding this blog:

(A) The only way to read more is to actually spend time reading more
(B) Reading, like an activity, invokes an opportunity cost
Therefore, (C) Actually reading more is going to come at the cost of other activities you could be doing

I think this ends up being a big stumbling block. This is partially why I don’t care so much about “the right way to read.” It is much easier for people to want to hit that place where they felt like a Proper Reader than it is for them to put down everything else — phone, work, other hobbies, TV, computer, videogames, whatever — and make a space to just enjoy that reading. Maybe a person is trying to return to those days when they would read in their room back at their parents’ house and feel like the future was endless but now it’s hard to find a book that returns them to that.

They are a different person now. The conversation they are having with books is different.

Especially for us old fogeys who might have read a lot back in the era when there were fewer constant distractions in our pocket and fewer screens dinging away at us with fewer gamified daily tasks we are supposed to accomplish.

I am not saying you have to gamify your reading — I’d rather you not — but maybe give yourself grace because it is an absolute fight and the main prize is just…reading. The end.

There is a lot out there. A whole lot. However you navigate that sea, paddle safely.

AND, and I cannot stress this enough, mind your own boat.

That is the only right way to read.⁵

It occurred to me while writing that that there must be a Facebook-centric BookBook but I refuse to confirm or deny or its existence. I’ll let it live as a beautiful thought in my head. ↩︎
I lie a bit. The person did not ask but instead furiously insisted that LotR was a book for children with her two criteria seemingly (a) it had no sex scenes [i.e., adult content] and (b) I think the fact that it was fantasy. ↩︎
A couple of years ago I clicked on a BookTube video about “reading lesser known works” and the criteria was something like “Less than 4k (2k?, whatever, too many) reviews on Goodreads” and I legit can’t imagine ever wanting something to be reviewed by thousands before I considered it viable. ↩︎
Live readmixing is the future. ↩︎
“But, Doug, being pedantic about what other people read is how I like to read…” la de da. Congrats. You have trapped and confused me. Can’t argue against that, can I? ↩︎

200 Days Later…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-08-15

In Reading

I apparently skipped the 700 Day mark so the previous 600 Day post would be my last check in. I feel like the subsequent 200 days have involved a lot more books than the previous 100 days.

I feel well-read for 2026 at this point.

Summer heat this past month has slowed me down a fair bit but the itch to ramp back up has been brewing again.

Tonight, though, I am going to watching horror movies and then read some more of the Tales from the Gas Station series.

Rereading Books

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-06-01

In Reading, Speculations

*Modified from a photo by Frank Flores via Unsplash+*

2026 has become a bit of a year for rereading books for me. Not intentionally. Not exclusively. However, a few things happened which have each driven me towards reading stuff I have already read.

Koji Suzuki’s passing was part of it. In honor of the recently late author, I did a deep dive reading of his short story collection Dark Water (note: there will be spoilers, but I had fun writing that). Since then I started rereading his Ring series.

I got the manga adaptation of Yukito Ayatsuji’s Decagon House Murders and read it all in an extended sitting. While not a perfect re-read, it still follows the story relatively precisely enough it felt like it.

There the whole to-do with watching Albert Campion: Sweet Danger and then exploring the oddities of the available Campion ebooks. I went back and read Sweet Danger at that time.

I had a sudden inkling to go back and try and recall my fandom of Christopher Moore which lead to rereading Practical Demonkeeping and Island of the Sequined Love Nun [while I enjoyed both ok, especially the former, it seems like I might not have become such a fan if I read him the first time this year].

I have even gone back and relistened to the audiobooks of the first three Dungeon Crawler Books after only reading those earlier this year.

And currently I am going back through Phil Rickman’s Curfew which may have been my first book read from him (I don’t remember) and enjoying myself. Before that, I reread the very short first book in the Cherringham series before starting to go back through that series.

All told, it is already around 1/3 of my total reading of the year and there are others I would like to revisit. Good Omens, perhaps. Darkest Part of the Woods. Maybe some Philip K. Dick. Could be fun to go back through some manga.

Some of it is because I had such a long stretch, nearly a decade, of being distanced from my reading life. Getting back into reading is very nice but there’s a sense of being dislocated a bit and using a few key works are helping to me realign.

I’ve been wondering what other people think about rereading. Seems like it once had to be the default. A personal library the size of my own is a rarity and even then if I stopped adding new books and just read what I had for the rest of my life I’d have to no doubt reread several volumes a few times to fill the gaps. Historically, the situation would have been tighter. Even with access to a public library, people would no doubt have had to reread books a few times unless they were in a particularly large city with lots of access to new texts.

Plus, it’s fun. Even tossing out Nabokov’s “no reading, only rereading” quote it is kind of nice how a well-known book is a map of an explored trail. First time through, you are probably looking down for loose rocks and looking around for trail markings. As you walk a trail again and again, you get to a point where you can feel the differences in the seasons. You can recall how the stream is full one year but empty the next. It might not hold the shock of truly new discovery but it holds something different: subtle discovery. If, and this is important, if it is a good trail to walk.

Which, I suppose, is exactly what Nabokov was on about.

I tried to look up some information about folks and attitudes on rereading, including a dive into more academic literature, and there are some nuggets there though the more academic side made me roll my eyes a good bit because it felt like some authors couldn’t be bothered to reread their own tedious papers. Stuff I saw had some folks talking about the importance of rereading. About the enjoyment. Revisiting old favorites like old friends. Some folks having a yearly re-read plan: especially certain big books of their youth. People talking about finding out new things each time.

One person even argued the Philosophy 101 argument that rereading is impossible because each time you read a book, you find something new. I…kind of like that.

Reading a book is an event where the author (and editor, and publisher, and typesetter, and all of them) meet the reader at a particular place in their lives. A two-body system where each body is part of the whole.

A person bitter over a divorce will read a book differently than a person newly married. Particular jobs and particular children and particular whatevers can all flavor reactions to plot points and characters. Just age. All that. Unless you live a fairly monotonous life, chances are you will have new eyes when you look at old pages.

Don’t get me wrong, though, the statement is academic twaddle. There is 100% a thing as re-reading. Calm down Heraclitus. It’s the same damned river. It’s just a different version of it.¹

Around my bookstore days, 2007ish, at the early shouts of the Social Media Revolution [more like de-evolution, amirite!? wink wink…etc], whenever people complained to me about rereading it was always in a broader context of detesting spoilers. Not sure what was up back then, but folks had a thing about spoilers for sure.

Now reading through some of those posts about why people don’t reread, it seems to be largely in the context of “there’s so much to read” with a minor addendum of “I don’t read much to begin with” in a few spots.

One bookblogger I found says that there is a pressure to always be reading something new because of the public nature of their reading habits. I think that tracks a bit, but is also a bit sad. What is essentially the public face of reading in the post-apocalyptic wasteland aftermath of the aforementioned Social Media Revolution is required by nature of their existence to always be caught up in the new thing. Sure, stuff like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves will be rediscovered every few months by someone who seems to try and claim a special ownership of it but overall The New™ drives content. A second two-body system in our existing two-body system. The Reader + The Author entwined with the The Reader’s Public Persona + The Reader’s Public Persona’s Audience.

Some of it is faff, of course. Another chunk of twaddle. There are too many books for you to read. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. At best we can merely find the books that we find. Lady Luck is another body in our ever-growing complexity of orbits.

None of this is to yuck anyone’s yum. Read. Don’t read. Reread. Just buy books to put on a shelf so guests can feel amazed. Whichever meets you where you are.

The you that was here five seconds ago.

Now gone.

And another…

“I never make love to the same woman twice, my wife is always surprising me.” It’s good for chatting to your friends but the fact that the universe is constantly being rewritten doesn’t stop it from being the same universe. Remember, Space Pilgrims, everything and nothing at the same time. Which is no time at all. ↩︎

The Weighted Reading Tally Returns (finally)

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-24

In Dougiverse, Reading

A fairly long habit of the older version of Dickens of a Blog was to have a reading tally where I personally tracked the books I read.

It started with “The Winter of Reading Lots” which was actually from September through December. The challenge, then, was to read 20 books and I seem to have hit it. To keep it “fair,” I introduced a weight, initially, so that different books had different points based on length and format. The data of the original weight is somewhat lost since I did not keep a changelog once I completed the challenge and just kept it as a rough tally.

Then, in 2007 I started the true precursor to the weighted reading tally. I will warn you, this is back when I read in the range of 70-120 books per year. 2007 was the first year where I actually started to properly try and break it down to get a better sense of what fit where in the reading spectrum based on my own vibes about the reading material.

In 2008 I started to develop the formulae to weight it towards a normalized book. Books were 1-2 books per book. That’s all you need to know to get where the madness might lead. The end result was 117 books.

By 2015, the last year it was kept as such, the formulae had developed to have a few different content types/lengths and had developed into what I felt was a pretty accurate reflection of my reading speeds and such. However, my reading habits were plummeting and I was only updating the notes semi-frequently so no doubt numerous things were getting lost.

Note that 2013 was incomplete and 2014 is effectively non-extant (presumably lost to some website update/glitch).

After almost a decade of rough years, really good years that involved a new kid, COVID, a life-changing accident, and all sorts of things I am finally wanting to try and get back into the “Reading as sport as well as pleasure” mindset and so today I spent a couple of hours building a brand-spanking new weighted reading tally and then converting my Have-Read List 2026 into that format. This now includes slightly different math on Short Stories and Graphic Novels and introduces Light Novels.

The new math/weights helps different divisions to add up more consistently (the old math meant it would count as reading “more” to list each comic/story in a graphic novel collection separately, for instance, now it is closer to a 1:1 for most).

But, Why?

There are a few reasons why I like doing this:

This is the kind thing that librarians who work with metadata and build web-pages consider fun, frankly.
Bragging.
I like having the data for myself because sometimes I forget exactly which volumes I read, and when, and having at least a basic finding tool helps me remember “Oh, I was on volume 7!”
A lot of systems that track reading lists tend to weight everything as 1 so you end up with a manga volume counting the same as War and Peace and that does not feel right.
It’s frankly a bit of a tragedy that readers who track this sort of thing are some of the most susceptible — besides people tracking their fitness/diet — to requiring third part data scrapers to enumerate their good habits.
Several of the more prominent ones are either baked into an eco-system — such as Amazon/Goodreads — or require at least as much time to add it to an external system and it would take and this way I can control the data.

The big reasons are mostly that I like external memory devices and it’s fun to brag, but I want to brag with a veneer of math.

Any 2026 Reading Goals?

Absolutely not. It will be what it will be.

600 Days…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-01-21

In Reading, Technology

Today, I hit this count…

All five of those read books, and the book I am currently reading, are Dungeon Crawler Carl. The first couple of books started out as roughly reasonable in their page count and the later ones have grown to books of a certain size. The sixth one, the one I am currently reading, is close to eight-hundred-pages long. I think the seventh one is similar.

At any rate, I have no good “number of pages read” metric to say off the top of my head and won’t get up to do the math but I’d wager that “more than three” will suffice as a page count total.

One of the earliest posts on this rebuilt blog was about hitting the five-hundred-days-of-reading mark. I included some caveats, there, that are still roughly applicable. The past century of days has tended to be more legit reading, hitting somewhere between fifty- and two-hundred-pages per day on average, but many of the points are otherwise valid.

I’m still refusing to make any specific goals, but I do appreciate the irony that letting go of caring about shiny made-up medals is helping to actually do more of the hobbies I like.

500 Day Reading Streak: I would like to thank the constant gamification of everyday pleasures! Also, my mom…

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-14

In Reading

Last night I hit a 500-day reading streak on my Kindle.

Which is to say on my Kindle App because I don’t think my Kindle, not even my newer Colorsoft one, has any sort of streak/days-of-reading/Kindle Challenge type screen. Maybe it does. I’m not going to look for it.

That’s neat though, hitting that. Only you can likely tell from the fact that the number of books I read on Kindle are only 31 this year [roughly 3 a month] so it doesn’t quite line up. With the move and all, it’s been a rough year for reading a lot.

I have maintained the act of looking at pages on a screen in a prescribed manner. I am the best.

Four quick thoughts and then to my morning workout with me! Why this streak is a lie…

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it’s actually longer…

The real total is something like 800 days. Twice over the past 2-3 years, the system has essentially not counted days when I have 100% read something. The last hiccup, apparently 500 days ago, was after I had spent a couple of hours finishing the back half of some book.

I remember being irate at the time because not only had I read for some time, but because I had the book in my library clearly marked as finished and had submitted a rating through the app. The “Finished Date” and presumably the “Rating Date” would have been for the day that the same app was claiming I had skipped reading.

Part of the reason I got to 500-days this time is because I was initially fussy about that and then it just became a habit.

I don’t recall the time before but I remember irate at that time, too.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only tracks the bare minimum…

I don’t know what all it actually tracks, not really. Is just opening the app enough? Just opening a book? The truth is that at 100-days of those 500-days were me opening the app or my Kindle (etc) and just reading for maybe 3- to 5-minutes. I would guess my average duration per day would not be all that high.

It is nice to have a gentle prod to keep up some reading because reading is a habit you have to nurture. It just might be better if I could set a minimal threshold [e.g., 10 pages, 20 minutes] to actually count.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only counts books-on-Kindle…

Probably half my reading, or more, in that whole time period was via physical books. Which means I either have to do the bare minimum opening of the app to satisfy above or I have to get a book on Kindle and on paper and then move the Kindle version forward.

I have done a bit both. Where both feel silly.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: the constant gamification of everyday pleasures is a poison…

In this case, the streak is not so much a lie as a constant external stressor to stay addicted to an app for reasons only tangentially related to the purpose of the app. Reading some is not hard for many of us but reading regularly is hard. Much like diet apps and exercise apps and productivity apps and language apps and many others: having this gamification added to them can help you to hit goals. That is true.

However, the fact that so many apps have such streaks and such baked in is mentally draining. We can no longer just play our games. Now, we have to play our games daily for shiny lights and particle effects to keep blessing us. Skip a day and you might just receive a meaningless warning. Our gentle hobbies to survive the soul-crushing march of modern life have been turned into just another stress for us to endure.

The whole time our personal data and habits are being scraped and digested by The Algorithm. Using the app is giving them permissions to dig deeper into our lives.

And we don’t even get paid. Hell, we pay for it.

Anyhow, off to see if I can hit 1000-days.