Getting Back on My Fictional Horse

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:54:39 -0500

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 out¹, 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.

Stranger To Fiction

I like fiction. I like to watch TV shows and movies that are fictional. I also used to really love to playing deeply narrative single player video games. But I’ve really struggled with books for a long time.

I visited Washington D.C. for the very first time in 2016 and while out exploring Dupont Circle ended up at Kramers. I love exploring bookstores and was almost immediately captivated by a book I found called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The book’s protagonist, like me, worked in marketing and loved technology before finding himself in the middle of a strange mystery involving a bookstore. There was so much for me to want to discover in a book that was rather tailor made for me.

But in the decade since I purchased it, I’ve never been able to sink my teeth into it. Various “book people” have all told me it’s okay to “DNF” (did not finish) a bad book rather than force yourself to finish it, but I don’t even know if it’s bad. I’m pretty sure I’m the problem.

Or, at least I thought I was until I picked up the first book in a sci-fi series last year that really turned me around on fiction. And no, it’s not that one.

All Systems Read

Back in January 2025, I opened up the Audible app to listen to whatever non-fiction book I was on at the time, and I noticed that All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first book in The Murderbot Diaries series, was available to listen for free. A couple days before, my wife and I had gone to Barnes & Noble and I’d seen copies of the book on a table with a sticker advertising it was soon to be made into a show on Apple TV+. Finding it in the app for free made me feel like I had nothing to lose, but realizing it was only a 3-hour listen made me actually give it a shot.

I listened to the whole thing in one night. Finishing a book in one sitting like that made me feel like a kid again, in the best way possible. I finished the second book the next day, and had finished the first four books of the series by the end of the month. Books in the series can vary greatly in length, but I was fully caught up through book seven in just 4 months.²

Murderbot really helped me find the fun in reading fiction again. It also helped me realize that part of my problem with non-fiction is that it can make me use my brain when it needs a rest. Part of this is the source material I was selecting, because if I’m reading a book about something close to what I do for work then obviously reading it will also kind of feel like work.

As an example, one non-fiction book I read recently was so good, but so densely packed with good stuff that I could really only stand to read it for about 10 minutes at a time because I’d want to make such copious notes about what I’d read. In short, a decade of reading in pursuit of knowledge had caused me to forget what it means to read in pursuit of fun.

Out of this Discworld

Finishing Murderbot gave me confidence in my ability to read something bigger. My wife isn’t a big science fiction reader, but for years she’d been strongly urging me to read the one book she fully enjoyed: Project Hail Mary. Fast forward to me enjoying reading again, especially science fiction, and it being the summer of 2025 right with the movie version’s trailer about to drop, she wanted me to read the book before anything about the movie would spoil it for me.

I initially dragged my feet about it for a few days, but eventually gave it a shot. I’m such an idiot. It was incredible. A true roller coaster, and the first time I’ve ever set with a book and just had to go heads down and hurry to finish it because I was so nervous about what would happen next. I finished it all in four days.

I still enjoyed the movie when it came out, but like any book adaptation there’s always more on paper than what makes it onscreen, and I may have even loved more of what didn’t make it to the screen than what did. I don’t think the movie was bad, per se, but it was one of the first times I really felt firmly on the side of the readers in the never-ending debate of books vs. movies.

Project Hail Mary was my eighth fiction book of 2025, not just breaking my fiction record for a year but the previous 18+ years combined. I was having too much fun and didn’t want to stop, so I wanted to find something I could read for a while. I was starting to learn that I liked books that were nerdy and funny, and the more I thought about my next read the more it became obvious that I should find another series (and no, it’s still not that one).

Elephants and Turtles

Before I read my first book of his, I was aware that Terry Pratchett was an author, but that was about it. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he wrote Discworld, because for a long time I didn’t even know it was different from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. To me, they were all just circular fantasy planes.

Yet as a longtime patron of the internet’s nerdier corners, I’ve been absorbing his work through osmosis. Pratchett is simply part of the background noise online, right alongside little Bobby tables, Hanlon’s razor, the IBM training manual, and an ungodly number of references to 42.

Even without committing his work to memory, bits of his universe have found their way to me. I’ve heard, at length, about the boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness that explains the punishing arithmetic of poverty through cheap footwear versus durable boots. I knew about Great A’Tuin, the world turtle whose back carries four giant elephants holding up the world. I had run across references to Ankh-Morpork’s “respectable” Thieves’ Guild, which keeps crime at a tidy, well regulated and “socially acceptable” quota. I was even casually familiar with Sam Vimes and the City Watch because BBC America adapted it (poorly I’m told) into a television series.

My first actual brush with his storytelling was the Amazon Prime adaptation of Good Omens. Like many others, I was drawn to it because of David Tennant’s casting. At that time, I was more aware of co-author Neil Gaiman, but his dark, moody books had never particularly interested me.³

After finishing eight sci-fi books, I was wonder if maybe this was my moment to try fantasy. Aside from The Hobbit, I’ve never even read fantasy, but I was intrigued because when I was sorting for funny adventure books Discworld was almost always top of each list. The final nudge came from a Reddit comment I found suggesting that anyone who loves wacky Dungeons & Dragons campaigns would feel right at home with Pratchett. A critical hit.

As of last week, I am now four books into the 41 book series. I’ve been told there are many different ways and orders you might possibly read the series (some which annoying people on the internet claim are “wrong”), but I didn’t listen to any of them and I started at the beginning. I’ve read The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort. All have been great.

I finally get what people have been clamoring about for so long. The writing is sharp, witty and surprisingly quite warm. I even thought the first two books (which people often dismiss as non-essential) were a lot of fun. Someone even told me that if I liked “the worst books he ever wrote,” that I would love everything that followed. I think it was a rather rude comment, but there’s a lot of world riding on that turtle and I’m excited to see how different stories explore it.

The Total Perspective Vortex

I could have ended this post after the previous paragraph, but it would have left out one other thing I’ve been reading lately: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After wrapping up Mort, I looked at starting the next Discworld book in the series: Sourcery. The original release order of the books is more-or-less “real time” in the canonical story universe, but it does jump around a lot between different POV characters. The book I’d just finished it considered part of the “Death” sub-series and Sourcery is part of the “Wizards” sub-series. Considering that I was about to completely change POV, I thought maybe I’d take a break and do something different.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably the book series I’ve always wanted to read in full but never have. I’ve owned a lovely (p)leather-bound physical copy of “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” omnibus for about 15 years, but the pages are that thin Bible-like paper that feels too delicate to actually read. So, obviously, I’ve repurchased it as an ebook twice.

Despite owning the series multiple times over, until last week I’d only read the very first book. I wanted to rectify that, so I started with the first book and cleared it in a day. I’m pretty sure this was my third time reading HHGTG, but my first since starting Discworld. I finally understand what people meant when they say it’s Pratchett in space, and I also completely agree.

Then, yesterday, for the first time ever, I finished reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and I finally know the ultimate question! Everyone and their mom knows the ultimate answer to live the universe and everything is 42 but 21 years⁴ after I read the book I finally I know the question! AH!

I’m now working my way through the third book in the five book trilogy. The series continues to be a fun and imaginative read, and a reasonably good critic of AI capabilities that seemed like distant capabilities. The Total Perspective Vortex in particular was so perfectly spot on. It’s too bad Douglas Adams isn’t here to witness it all. He probably would have hated it, but the way he made fun of it would have at least made everything a bit more fun.

Epilogue

After finishing The Small Stuff, my wife sent me a clip featuring author Jason Reynolds on the NPR podcast It’s Been a Minute.

“In one book everybody can change. In 300 pages every character that you’ve met has become a new character by the end. And so what might you do in 30 days, let alone 30 years? This is incredible. You get a snapshot of your potential every time you read a novel. That I think is what the beauty is, and I wish more men tapped into it. I’m so tired of people quoting me the 48 laws of power, whatever it is. I’m so tired. It’s like, bro, we not going to war. Why you trying to strategize about how to get over? I’m trying to figure out how to get you to love yourself. And what in these books are going to teach you that? You say you want to win a war, a war that I’m not always sure we fighting. Who are you fighting other than you? When you going to determine that part? When you going to realize all these women around you love you? When you going to figure out that your children love you? When you going to figure out that not everybody’s out to get you? Novels, fiction is what shows us all of that.

I kind of just sat stunned for a minute. If this doesn’t get you inspired to read more fiction I don’t know what will. 📚

I absolutely should count it because I got much more out of that reading than when I was forced to read it for my eighth grade Pre-AP English class. ↩︎
I was fully caught up before Murderbot premiered on Apple TV. I watched two episodes before bailing because I didn’t like the changes the show makes from the books. ↩︎
With one exception for American Gods. The premise was incredible, and I so badly wanted to like it but despite trying twice, I could never make it past chapter 3 before I really felt like I was really forcing myself to engage with something I wasn’t resonating with. I wanted to give the Showtime adaptation for TV a try, but when it was cancelled before arriving at the end of the story I lost interest in ever starting it. The allegations against him emerged after I gave up on the book/show and given the credible accusations against him I no longer have any desire to try engaging with his work ever again. ↩︎
Pure coincidence that’s half of 42? Feels highly improbable to not be. ↩︎