2021 Year In Books
According to my Goodreads account, I read 267 books.
Wuuuhhh? That is a lot.
Yes, it is...but around 200 of them are children's books I've read to my son.
My son and I are still on our journey to read 1,000 books before Kindergarten. In cooperation with our local library, we use the Beanstack app to track his progress. The app keeps the library in the loop and notifies everyone when we hit milestones that might warrant a fun gift! (books, coupons to local restaurants, etc).
When I was a kid we had the Book It! Program that would give out personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut for doing your summer reading. In hindsight, I’m not sure how I feel about this…
As of this writing, my wife and I have read a book with my son in the neighborhood of 912 times. I say "in the neighborhood" because we have not always been great about remembering to log the books we read (and we weren’t really aware of the 1,000 books before kindergarten challenge until he was nearly 2 years old—he’s 4 now).
As my own side project I keep track of every unique title I've ever read to my son and we are currently at 385 different books.
Why?...
I don't know. Part of me just thought it would be a really cool statistic to keep track of. No particular goal in mind.
Notables for the year:
I fell in love with everything Fredrik Backman writes.
I continued my journey of reading the original Astro Boy Manga, completing Volumes 5 through 17
I participated in two different book clubs this year:
AIGA Design Educators Community Book Club. We read teaching related self-improvement style books
Austin Kleon's "Read Like An Artist" Book Club that he does with Literati (a paid book club service that sends each month's pick to you in the mail). I just read the book they are doing from the library on my own without paying for Literati (sorry?).
I decided I want to read all the Caldecott Medal Winning Children's books (awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year)
I stumbled upon Ryan Holiday's YouTube channel and fell down a rabbit hole of reading Stoic Philosophy. I've never felt so heard in my life as I do while reading stoicism.
Looking forward to what books 2022 brings. I’ve set this year’s goal to 52 (roughly one book a week).
Below is a screenshot of the books I’ve read via my Goodreads “read” shelf. Feel free to browse through them and Tweet/Email me if you want to chat about any titles.
