A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? January Report

In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

Well, unlike Simon, who seems to have a huge library of unread books from just about every decade, I have just been reading through my pile, and my worst fears are being justified. Just in the first weeks, I read seven books written in 2023! I had to decide whether, on my page for keeping track, I would list just one book per year or go ahead and list every book I read for that year, and I decided to do the latter, because the former was just too frustrating. I also had to decide, because my first few book reviews for the year were for ones I read in 2023, whether to list those. I decided to do that even though it might seem like cheating, because it’s unlikely that I am going to meet this challenge at the rate I am going. And in any case, by the end of the year, I won’t have posted reviews of the books I read towards the end of the year yet.

I will summarize my progress so far by decade. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

• 1925-1934: 4 books (however, 3 of them are for 1934—I don’t know how I did that)
• 1935-1944: 1 book
• 1945-1954: 1 book
• 1955-1964: 2 books
• 1965-1974: 2 books
• 1975-1984: 1 book
• 1985-1994: 0 books
• 1995–2004: 0 books
• 2005-2014: 2 books
• 2015-2024: 16 books, but 7 of them are from 2023

So, although Simon said the first half of the year you could just plug in the years and later begin to purposefully look for books for the years you don’t have, I may have to come up with a plan that is more specific sooner, because random reading doesn’t seem to be working well for me.

I’ll post this report each month, so you can see how I’m doing.