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.
