When I was in middle school, the Newark Public Library had a contest for how many books you could read in one summer. I read more than 100, but not much more, maybe 105 or 106.

  I’m certain there was an Amelia Bedelia book in there but I only remember one book distinctly, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp. I was probably the age my daughter is now when I read it. I know she likes his poems, I’m sure I did too when I was her age.

  There are a few books I’ve read along with her on this list. The Bottle Imp will probably end up on there too. I read books with my mom as well. I didn’t win the contest that year. The winner had more than 400 books and we both thought they must have cheated. Who knows. Some summers now I can barely get through two or three books.

  I first thought of the idea of writing a book like this about halfway through the decade. I hadn’t tracked the books I’d been reading since that summer as a kid. I couldn’t begin to estimate how many books I’d read between then and when I started tracking it at the start of the decade.

  It happened accidentally. I’d been piling my books up as I read them in 2020 and decided to post it to Instagram at the end of the year, then I did it again the next year I read any books. There was a significant break there. I’d like to blame the pandemic, but I’d picked up Roger Stone’s Nixon book and just could not get through it. I also read the Bible from cover to cover for the first time, but that’s a subject for an entirely different book.

  By 2025, I’d realized I’d been reading enough books to draw some conclusions about them and myself. I also found I’d been discovering new to me writers, like Ann Beattie or Frank Waters, and filling in gaps I shouldn’t have had by my age, like Jane Austen or Graham Greene. The British were always difficult for me.

  I also found I’d been forgetting some of the books. I remember as a kid sometimes I’d ask my mom if she’d read a certain book and she’d say she wasn’t sure. I couldn’t imagine how that would be possible but now I totally understand. There are certainly books I don’t remember whether I’ve written.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  I used to write a lot when I was younger, a lot of creative fiction. My reading up to when I’d started thinking about this book had been almost exclusively literary fiction. I’d stopped writing creatively when I started to write professionally, about a decade in television and six years at a magazine and blog. It does feel like a zero sum game.

  I was able to start reading recreationally even more when I’d lost my job, and to start to try to write creatively again. Despite having thought about this book, and about my relationship to reading, I didn’t connect immediately my return to being able to write creatively with the reading I’ve been doing.

  By the end of the decade I may have totally forgotten the books I’ve read at the beginning. It’s not just the first few months before the pandemic that feel like a lifetime ago anymore.

  Henry Miller’s The Books In My Life is an obvious inspiration for this work. I haven’t read it, or much Henry Miller, yet, but I expect it’ll be in here before I’m done.

  I’m starting to write this book, and not just think about it, before the decade is done, in large part because it’s so easy to forget what you’ve read, but also because I’ve been writing so much more recently, and because the web novel formats fascinate me.

  I don’t know how late in the decade I’ll catch up to where I’m at the book I’ve just finished reading, or if the work will turn into more of a journal at that point. If I’d had this thought when I opened the first book in 2020 (late 2019 actually), it would be a completely different work.

  I don’t want to approach this as a reading journal. I was never interested in contributing to GoodReads and websites like it, though I like to look at the average ratings of the books I’ve read, and how many people have rated it, to get a sense of how the book is situated in the public consciousness. Book reviews usually frustrate me—critics seem to miss a lot, or be performing to prove their own literary merits.

  This isn’t a reading journal or a collection of book reviews. It’s a story, about reading and about living and remembering, about this decade and what it did to me, and maybe to you too.