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Originally Posted by orlok
I do the same - there are still hundreds, if not thousands, that I read in my late teens and early adulthood (when I had time to read a two or three books a day, sometimes more) that I can't remember, and when I stumble across them now I'll add them to the list, but it will never be complete. I have also resisted adding any children's books (Enid Blyton's mysteries, the Hardy Boys etc. etc.) as that's going too far, IMO  ). |
I've decided that this year I'm going to make an effort to add a few books at a time to my Goodreads list. Just in my bookshelves, I've got hundreds of books that I've read. Still, as you say it will never be complete, nor would I even want it to be. All those mysteries I used to devour!
That said, I don't know quite what to do about authors who were of some importance to me (albeit not to the literary world) whose entire œuvre I've read, but it would be faintly ridiculous to list
all their books. Angela Thirkell, just as one example - I greatly enjoyed her more than thirty novels (some more than others, of course), but I can hardly differentiate among them now. She herself had her literary doppelgänger, Mrs. Morland, say about her books, "Not but what they are all the same, because my publisher says that pays better." On a higher plane, how about C.P. Snow's
Strangers and Brothers sequence? I was mesmerized by those novels and I think I've listed one; do I just go ahead and add the other ten?
It's all just for fun, of course, I'm not really losing any sleep over it.
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Congratulations on your challenge achievements, btw, very impressive, and you definitely shouldn't beat yourself up over the sub-challenges. Wish I could even approach your total.
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I topped out the year with 76 books read (against a target of 75) so I was pleased with that, and also beat my average page-count target. Not as many books as I would like to read (I managed 110 in 2011) but given where I am in life and the distractions I have, I'm happy with where I am .
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Thank you and congratulations to you, too. The only person we're in competition with is ourselves, of course; I'm delighted that my reading has become increasingly rewarding now that it's more focused and I keep track.