I try to read a lot. A few years ago, 2015 to be exact (yay, I can be exact!), I managed only 30 books, and for me, that's low. I've done better since. Tonight I finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness — an elegant, poetic and sometimes quite beautiful novel, with a relatively slow pace (not much happens in it) befitting the slower pace of life on the world Le Guin invented for it — and I'm back to reading a Richard Matheson short story collection.

I focus on novels, but I count in my annual tally of books I've read the book-length works I've read: non-fiction books, obviously, plus film scripts, poetry collections, story collections (recently, for example, Stephen King's Four Past Midnight), and certain comic book arcs. (I'm inconsistent about how I note comic books on my list: I tend not to count ongoing series I'm collecting and reading right now, like Marvel's X-Men Gold, but I would count a six-issue volume of a collected complete comic story like David Walker's recent six-issue Planet of the Apes: Ursus.) I counted tonight, and my total since January 1st has been 82 book-length works.

But I feel good about this: counting just the novels, including certain behemoths like The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ*, so far I've read 56. I aim for the pace of at least a novel a week, so this pleases me.

May I become an ever-faster reader...

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* And, to be fair, non-behemoths like Beverly Cleary novels for kids.