posh.wiki

Just before the beginning of 2025, I set myself a goal of reading at least 1 book every 2 weeks for a minimum total of 24 books throughout the year, and write about each one of them on this site. Now, at the end of the year, I have 11 posts on the bookshelf page, and did read another (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley), which sums to exactly half of what I hoped.

I remember considering that setting myself the strict goal of "one book every 2 weeks", rather than specifically "24 books in 2025", might cause me to lose all motivation if I fell behind. In retrospect I can say that this isn't the factor that caused me to fall short of the goal.

Instead, my biggest obstacle was not creating the environment for success. It's quite uncommon that I actually have time to truly read a book, though they're plenty accessible between my home bookshelf, local libraries, kindle, and an epub reader app on my phone. The barrier is moreso facilitating access to audiobooks, which are much more accessible for me, during the hours each day I spend travelling and working.

I flat-out refuse to use Audible, because I don't want to give Jeff Bezos a single penny more than I have to. After some experimenting, the best solution I have is to use my phone to download audiobooks from my Jellyfin server, then play them using VLC (because the Jellyfin client doesn't let me adjust playback speed). This way, I have access to them at all times, with a sufficient degree of separation that it will hopefully reach a threshold of friction where I won't be tempted to pause it and listen to something more interesting when it comes up.

Then, I suppose, there comes the question of what to read. I find it far more difficult to find things to read. I once considered writing a program that would use a machine learning model to create a vector representation of entire books, then make recommendations based on what you'd enjoyed before, but decided against it (because it would encourage people to exist in an echo chamber and not explore new horizons, and also because I can't be arsed).

On my reading list currently is Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. I enjoyed one of her earlier works of fantasy/fiction, Babel, and I understand that Katabasis is of a similar genre. I'd also like to continue with R. A. Salvatore's works set in the Forgotten Realms, since I enjoyed his Dark Elf Triology, as well as Lev Grossman's The Magicians series. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time are also series I'd like to give a shot in the fantasy genre.

As for sci-fi — and I admit, grouping sci-fi and fantasy together has its merits in certain circumstances, but they address different cravings for me — I'd like to get into some of the apocryphal Star Trek* novels.

In the realm of classics, I've been meaning to try Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (unabridged and in the original French), even though it'll probably take 8 of my 9 lives. I also picked up a copy of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey this year, which I'd like to get around to.

I've enjoyed a few romance books, but only really the gay ones, since I struggle to emotionally connect with straight romance stories - so I'm open to the idea if any good recommendations come along, but don't have any in particular I'm looking forward to right now. As for crime and thriller books, I haven't identified what it is (or isn't) about them, but I've found that I don't really enjoy them.

That leaves non-fiction. I know I'd like to read some, but I don't have any on my list right now. Maybe it's Dunning and Kreuger talking, but I feel like I'm currently at a stage where I can learn more about my existing skills and interests more by practice than by conuming theory, but similarly, I don't currently feel drawn to any new fields of research. I suppose I'll have to see what comes up as the year goes on.

So, my more achievable goal for 2026 is a minimum of 13 books, at a rate of just over 1 per month. The only person I have to compete against is my past self, so it makes sense to me to set my standard as a definite improvement upon my previous attempt. I guess we'll check back in a year and see!

* Chill out. Em-dashes were cool before AI, and I just learned about \—.