Reading reboot

short attention span theater

I started 2025 with the lofty goal of reading 25 books. They could be any combination of paper, ebook, or audiobook (don’t start with me, audiobooks are and will always count as reading.) Somewhere along the line, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it to 25 so I revised my goal down to 20. Now here we are, about to cross into the 12th month of 2025 and I have read a grand total of 12 books.

Of those 12, five of them have been audiobooks. Now granted, one of them was Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour which, at 50 hours and change, was easily the longest audiobook I’ve ever listened to, beating Barbra Streisand’s memoir by 2 full hours. I’m just not one to pick short audiobooks to listen to, as evidenced by deciding this was also the year that I would listen to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was 28+ hours. The shortest audiobook I listened to this year was Emma Straub’s time travel novel This Time Tomorrow which ran just over 8.5 hours.

I have a couple books going right now, and I had been stuck on both of them for the last couple weeks, never wanting to read the ebook I’m reading or listen to the audiobook I’m listening to. Most of my audiobook listening happens on my walk to and from work every day and for some reason, every day when I started that walk, I just wasn’t in the mood for talking, opting instead for music and realizing that I was falling further and further behind in my goal. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it was just I felt like I was never in the mood for it.

The audiobook in question here is Phil Collins’ autobiography Not Dead Yet: The Memoir. I am a sucker for celebrity memoirs read by the author, and even though I am not really a die-hard Phil Collins fan, I figured that he was enough of a fixture of my high school and college years that I would enjoy it. And overall, I have. Maybe not with the zeal that I enjoyed Barbra’s memoir or Cher: The Memoir, Part One, but I enjoy his candor and he’s a really good narrator. It caused a huge spike in my Genesis listening which I didn’t see coming (although I should have.) Over the last few days, I’ve listened to a good chunk of it which has reinvigorated me and with 4 hours left, I should be able to knock this out within a week or so if I can just resist the pull of listening to music on my walk to and from work every day.

And yesterday, I finally picked the eBook I’m reading back up again. This book is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which has been recommended to me by everyone and their brother. I picked it up on the cheap from Bookbub a while back (as I always say, the road to my bankruptcy will be paved with $3 eBooks from Bookbub), but never got around to reading it. A friend told me he was reading it too, so I decided no time like the present. I got to about the 30% mark and just…stopped. For no reason at all - it wasn’t like I wasn’t enjoying it, but clearly other things had grabbed my attention and my interest in the book had waned so much that I wondered if it would be another for the did-not-finish pile. But as I said, yesterday I picked it up and read about 80 pages and now I’m over half way through that book too.

So I feel like I’ve rebooted myself a bit as far as reading goes. I try not to beat myself up for not reading more than I am because I realize that 12 books in a year is still 12 more than a lot of people read these days. But I kinda want to recommit myself to reading more and being on my phone less. So I added the new Kindle Paper White to my Christmas list, knowing full well that no one will get it for me because it’s $160 (although it was marked down for Black Friday, but I’m trying not to buy stuff from Amazon right now and Christmas IS coming and you just never know what might happen.) I’m still debating between that and the Colorsoft which, as the name implies, has color but is still decided not a tablet. It’s also a lot more expensive as you might imagine so I might just settle for the Paper White. My current Kindle is older than dirt and pretty slow. I also hate reading on my phone because I am so distractable I end up doing other stuff when I’m supposed to be reading.

Colorsoft on the left, Paper White on the right.

We shall see what happens, but I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to get these two books finished by the end of the month and end the year with a grand total of 14 books read. Even though that feels like a pathetically small number, I just have to remember that it’s not a contest and having the spoons to read in these strange times with the daily onslaught of bad news is more than a lot of people can do.