I love to read. Fiction exercises my imagination and explores new possibilities, and Nonfiction continues a lifelong love of learning.

With a 30-minute one-way commute, I have plenty of time for audiobooks. Each time I pick up library books for Amanda, I peruse the ‘new arrivals’ shelf for something interesting. And a Kindle e-reader motivates me to read even faster than paper (plus it is filled up with a large backlog of freebies and books obtained through my work’s professional development fund).

A few years ago, I began tracking a list of books I’d read on my Scrambled Mind site. The list grew so quickly that I outgrew my Web 1.0 rule for the page and turned it into a searchable database. Awhile after that, I started adding mini-reviews for each book (though they sometimes turned into comments on the narrator, publication style, or some other random life even that occurred while reading the book).

As the list of completed titles grew, I began wondering how much I was actually reading. Book counts were too rough, since sometimes I read tiny short-stories, sometimes huge novels, and plenty of in-between. In 2011, I read through the whole Bible (though I suppose I could count that as 66 books instead of 1). Eventually, I determined that page counts were the best approximation of volume, and most books’ page counts could be looked up on sites like Amazon. Then with HTML magic, I turned those page counts into a fancy schmancy* graph.

I might say that it’s not a ‘race’ and that I don’t expect to read more each year, but holy cow! I read almost 25,000 pages in 2012. That’s a crazy pace (at least compared to previous years), but wouldn’t it be great if I could keep it up?

My goal (totally not a ‘resolution’… that’s sooo 9 days ago) this year is to read more nonfiction. Only 4,000 pages last year were nonfiction. I thought a reasonable goal this year would be one nonfiction book a month, but I achieved that last year. Once you toss out the ‘mini books,’ I read 14, or just over one a month. Perhaps a good goal this year would be 2 nonfiction books a month or 10,000 pages.

What do you think? Are there any good books not on my list you think would be good for me this year?

^{*I like the word ‘schmancy’ even though my spell-check seems to think ‘Scotchman’ is the appropriate replacement.}