rbradakis

When I retired in May 2024 one of the things I was hoping would happen is that I would start reading more books. When I was a kid I could easily get through 4 books a week (4 books was the most the local library would lend at a time).

As I became an adult I had less time to read. Getting up at 6:30am to catch a train to go to London to work, then drinking with co-workers and getting home gone midnight... yeah, not much reading time there!

And, of course, books got larger. A 1960s Asimov story.. oh, let's say "The End Of Eternity" (a book I loved as a kid) was 72,000 words long. A modern SciFi book starts at 100,000 words and can easily be 120,000 or more. Peter Hamilton books, maybe 170,000 words :-)

And, bluntly, stories became more sluggish. You can sprint through an Asimov story because they're pretty shallow; they have one point of view, they have a singular story vector... it's easy to read. I would get a Discworld book for Christmas and consume it in 3 hours. Something to do after Christmas dinner when people would fall asleep in front of James Bond :-)

Compare that to, say, Alastair Reynolds; we have multiple points of view, the story might be sluggish by design, to emphasize the struggle of the viewpoint character; the world might be dirty and slimey and it doesn't really encourage you to be there. Is it a more textured story? Definitely! Is it something I can read as quickly; no. Is it something I might reread? Possibly not.

Since 2008 I've been tracking the number of books I've read each year. I kinda tried to normalize the numbers ("2 Peter Hamilton Books is the same as 3 Charlie Stross books" just based on word count). Yeah, it's not a real number. But a good estimate.

And this year, I finally broke my record in that time period. I'm at 56 books and climbing. Now part of that might be because I'm re-reading the Simon R Green books (Nightside and Secret Histories). Green's writing is "quick and easy" to read.

But part of it is because I've stretched out on my sofa, put on some background music (maybe Tubular Bells, maybe Jean-Michel Jarre) and then just read for a few hours. And then gone to bed and read some more.

I think I'm getting the hang of this "retirement" lark!