I Have a List of Every Book I’ve Ever Read
I don’t consider myself an obsessive person. I’m pretty good at letting stuff roll off my back, maybe too good. But there’s one thing I have to do no matter what, something that I’ve been doing since 2010 when I was still in high school.
For 16 years I have kept a list of every single book I read, who wrote it, and a rating out of five. And this really is every book I’ve ever read, too, because I did not read books for pleasure before 2010. I was 17 and 18 that year (my birthday is smack dab in the middle of the year). I was having a bad year, my first serious ("serious") girlfriend cheated on me and my relationship with her drove my friends away. I was lonely and bored, so one day during lunch break I went to the library, and for some reason picked up a copy of Genesis Alpha by Rune Michaels.
I read it cover to cover, the first book I ever read of my own volition. I don’t remember anything about it; it’s apparently some YA book about… oh. I just looked it up online and I just figured out why I chose this book. The protagonist is named Josh and his brother is Max, which was the name of my dog at the time. Okay, well there’s one mystery solved, in real time! Anyway, the book is about Max getting arrested for murder and Josh having to come to terms with that. I’d say something about how I don’t want to go back and read it because I don't want to ruin the nostalgia, but apparently I didn’t like it back then either, giving it two out of five.
It was good enough though. I read another eleven books that year! I had just started reading, cut me some slack. Apparently I had a love/hate relationship with an author named Kevin Brooks. I read three of his books at the end of the year. He wrote Being and Martyn Pig which both got a coveted three out of five, and Road of the Dead which also got a two. I wasn’t in love with The Road either, giving it only a three as well. Nothing got higher than a three, a picky little brat I was.
In 2011 I stepped out of my comfort zone with John Steinbeck, the first two Hitchhiker’s Guide books (the first got a five and Restaurant got a four), and Yahtzee Croshaw’s first book, Mogworld, which also got a four. In 2012 I stepped up, reading 28 books. I read my first Discworld this year, A Hat Full of Sky, which got a full five. The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time which is still one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I need to re-read, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Catcher in the Rye, and Stephen King’s On Writing.
The most books I’ve read in a single year was 2019 with 41. I guess that’s not a lot to most people, but for me that’s still a high I haven’t been able to reach again. It started with The Empress of Art, about Catherine the Great’s art collection. Not sure why I read that, apparently I didn’t like as it only got a two. I read Gone Girl which is the worst book I’ve ever finished.
2019 is also the year I started reading Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. I read four of them this year alone, and haven’t read another since, for some reason. I distinctly remember in one of the books, Wallander was so drunk he was stumbling around outside in the snow when he got a phone call from his boss who told him that some other random cop caught the killer and the book ended soon after. I can find that anywhere online though, so maybe I’m misremembering.
I read The Underground Railroad this year and loved it, giving it a five, and then two more fives in a row to The Wayhaven Chronicles Book One and Heroes Rise: HeroFall, two interactive novels. Then there’s some… eww on this list. This was the year I read my first Neil Gaiman book, The Graveyard Book and gave it a five. Ick. I also read Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live which I gave a four. I had no idea she was before picking up the book, and let me tell you, looking her up after finishing this book made me want to vomit. I was wondering why there was all that weird Christian indoctrination stuff at the end.
2020 was a quiet year on the reading front, ironically. I discovered Fredrik Backman, and despite how sticky sweet, overly-saccharine his books are, I do love them. I read some more Terry Pratchett, something called The Undertaker’s Daughter by Kate Mayfield which I apparently hated, and Never Caught which got five stars. I also read a book about the history of Sony this year by John Nathan because I was working on a video that never materialized, which was just okay.
2022 is when it all went wrong. Between 2022 and 2024 I read just 27 books combined. Seven of them were manga, I was in love with Toilet-bound Hanako-kun for some reason, going through all seven of those in late 2022. I also read that year something called On the Ice by Gretchen Legler which I do not remember reading in the slightest. In 2023, three of the nine books I read were re-reads of the Wayhaven Chronicles, and for some reason I re-read two of the Kurt Wallander books but not any of the ones I hadn’t read yet.
And, I’m embarrassed to say this… in 2024 I only read two books. Bookshops and Bonedust and Legends and Lattes, both by Travis Baldree. I don’t know why it was only those two, specifically. I thought they were both okay, but not great. In fact I sold then on eBay and actually turned a little profit, the only time I ever made money selling books. This was the year I quit my day job and put all of my focus in trying to make my YouTube channel work. It didn’t. But I was so busy working on videos and playing video games that I didn’t read. I remember not really wanting to read much last year, something that carried over to the first few months of this year.
Between January and April 2025, I only read four books. But between May, when I decided to quit YouTube, and November I’ve read 14. I’ve discovered a love/hate relationship with CJ Cherryh, I rode the roller coaster of Daniel Hardcastle’s The Paradox Paradox, I surprisingly fell in love with Circe, I hated The Mermaid, The Witch, and the Sea, but loved How Good it is I Have No Fear of Dying which is a fantastic account of the war in Ukraine from a woman fighting on the frontline.
I read Haruki Muarakami for the first time this year, though funny enough not his fiction work. I read Underground and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I found for sale at my local library for fifty cents. They sell books all the time for a quarter or two and I’ve gotten so much stuff from them over the years. I really enjoyed both of them, especially Underground. Though that’s a far cry from his surrealist fiction, from what I’ve heard.
It feels good to be reading again, I didn’t realize how much I missed it. Looking through this list, I’m surprised by how many of these books I remember and how much of them I remember. There are only two or three books I have no memory of at all. I am curious to go back and re-read some of the earlier books, like Genesis Alpha, The Road, and those Kevin Brooks novels, just to see what I think about them today. But I’ve got so many books in my TBR pile right now, 34(!) of them, some of which have been sitting there for years. I should probably do something about that...
