books

When I finished reading The Small Stuff (a non-fiction book), I excitedly told my wife and she asked me how many books I’d read this year. I thought for a second before saying, “Maybe three or four?” After I logged it to my GoodReads I went to check where this put me on my 2026 reading challenge. To my shock I didn’t even have a 2026 reading challenge. It was my first book to finish this year.

I was a fantastic reader when I was a kid, but about as soon as books became big enough that I couldn’t finish them in one sitting I started to have trouble with them. As I progressed through school, I started to only read the books I was assigned to read. But after I finished high school, I almost completely stopped reading fiction for fun. I’m no expert, but I’d also wager a guess that my then-undiagnosed ADHD probably also played a role.

Until last year, the only fiction books I’d read since high school were the first four Harry Potter books (circa 2010-2013, not recently), Ready Player One and David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary. If I also count a re-reading of The Hobbit I did before those movies came out, that’s just seven books in 18 years. But that’s not really a fair accounting of things, because as best I can recollect, I read all of those more than a decade ago. Looking back through my GoodReads, Kindle and Audible history, I can confidently say I did not finish a single fiction book between 2014 and 2024.

It’s not that I wasn’t reading entirely though. Between 2014 and 2024, I finished about 25 different non-fiction books and started but did not finish about 10 more. Even now, “currently reading” items on my GoodReads profile are non-fiction.

Even if those numbers are accurate I don’t think ~2.5 books per year is especially good, and no fiction for a decade is actually quite bad.