a.k.a. V.J.

On New Year’s Eve, Goodreads informed me that that I had read 70 books in 2025. The number shouldn’t have been a surprise to me as I track everything I read on the platform, and it does provide a running count throughout the year. I just wasn’t paying all that much attention. (Goodreads also provided a fun, sharable infographic with all my reading stats and the titles I completed, but for whatever reason, WordPress doesn’t want to let me display it here.)

I know a lot of avid readers blow my 70 figure out of the water without breaking much of a sweat, but it is a lot for me. I also think with these gamified online platforms, there’s always a danger of getting carried away with stats at the expense of the activity itself. All that said, I am proud of the fact that back at the beginning of 2024, I set a goal for myself to read consistently, and two years late that habit is still going strong. Seventy is just where I wound up on December 31 — the real achievement was reading something just about every day of the year.

Goodreads prompted me to set a goal for 2026. Normally, I’m a bit of sandbagger with those types of goals. Going into 2025, I set a goal of 30, knowing full well that I would leave it in the dust. This year, however, I am going to try to outdo myself. My 2026 reading goal is 75 books. That’s an aggressive pace, but still attainable, I think.

In the spirit of meeting my ambitious goal, I am currently reading two books simultaneously: Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, a terrific historical fiction about Royal Navy derring-do during the Napoleonic Era and Black Money, an installment of Ross Macdonald’s always-enjoyable Lew Archer private detective series. If everything I read in 2026 is as good as those two volumes have been so far, 75 is going to be a cakewalk.