I was never big on New Year’s Resolutions.1 I’m still not. But some way, somehow, I made one last December: read 50 books in a year.

The Trial

The choice of number was somewhat arbitrary. I thought a book a week would be nice and easy to keep track of, but would I really be able to keep up that pace? I realized if I gave myself two weeks off, I would have 50 books instead of 52, and 50 is a very appealing number.2 So, 50 it was. I was even able to give myself a bit of a head start because I was in the middle of reading some books when the ball dropped.3

Unlike every other NYR I’ve made in my contiguous 23 years of being, I’ve been keeping up with this one. Present tense.4 It’s been the ideal NYR experience for me: challenging, yet fun and fulfilling. I even added two sub-resolutions, looser goals I didn’t have to always meet: try to keep a fiction book in rotation, and try to keep an audiobook in rotation.

“Rotation” means exactly what you think it does; to put even more things on my plate, I wanted to try reading multiple books at once, inspired by the following quote.

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

–Virginia Woolf

It would seem that I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf, because that’s a damn big number.5 At first I tried doing the same, but she probably meant books that were about similar things. It was difficult to hold A History of the Philippines and The Brothers Karamazov in conversation (both of which are on hiatus, so to speak), and I ended up being one chapter deep into seven different books. After watching a YouTube video about getting through your backlog, I followed their advice and brought my rotation size down to three.

Within a couple of months I fell into a rhythm. I’d finish a book in about a week, reading maybe an hour before bed, and write it down on my phone or laptop. I’d listen to audiobooks while on my morning walk. I read books gathering dust on my shelves and books hot off the presses. For more than half the year, nearly three-quarters, I kept this rhythm up.

Past tense.

Paradise Lost

At the start of the year, the desire to read more books coincided with another desire: the desire to organize my Notes app.

It isn’t a good idea to give me an infinitely tall stack of sticky notes. I jot down pretty much anything. Random thoughts I had just before falling asleep, a million half-baked to-do lists, restaurant recommendations, first drafts of fanfiction, songs, passwords, links, whatever.

Being former president of the TUGSLUG,6 I’m always conscious of my over-reliance on proprietary technology. If I’m just using the Notes app like a glorified stack of Post-its, why must I do it on Tim Apple’s terms? There’s nothing special about the Notes app keeping me locked into the Apple ecosystem. I should use something else to jot down my notes, something more Linuxish.

Naturally, I turned to Obsidian. I was drawn to its simplicity, robustness, integration with technology, and price (or lack thereof). Despite it not being FOSS, it’s quite popular in FOSS circles. It even has Vim keybindings. And I didn’t use it in the crazy, technical, productive way like a Second Brain or a Zettelkasten or a personal wiki. I used it as a Notes app, but this time with folders. Just another glorified stack of Post-its.

Though it’s free, Obsidian does offer a paid service called Obsidian Sync which lets you (surprise, surprise) sync your notes between devices. But since Obsidian stores notes as plain Markdown files, all you need is a file-sharing service like Dropbox to get the same effect. I decided for the sake of simplicity to use iCloud.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. But that also means there are times when it isn’t. There are even times when the simplest solution is the worst one. What I’m getting at is some way, somehow, the file I was using to keep track of all the books I had read this year got overwritten.

When I realized what had happened, swarms of would’ves and could’ves and should’ves buzzed inside my head. I should’ve paid for Obsidian Sync. I should’ve used git to do version control. I should’ve used a different app. I should’ve used Orgmode. I could’ve used Goodreads, or StoryGraph, or BookWyrm, or something.

But I’m not so sure that would’ve fixed things.

Was I sad? Of course. I lost all my progress towards reaching both a goal and the end of the year. I lost also a memento, a gift for my future self. A gift that got lost in transit. I was looking forward to looking back.

But the real sting was something else. The real sting was that betrayal, that grim reminder that technology, like all things, is fallible.

Snow Crash

Technology has a a very strange patchwork of memory. Sometimes photographic, sometimes like a goldfish.7

I always remember being told in school to be careful what I put on the internet, because it’ll stay there forever. But that’s not true. Try looking up a solution to any technical problem you have and reading through a Reddit thread full of redacted comments solving it, then tell me how forever the internet is. This u/[deleted] guy must know his stuff, I see his replies everywhere!

Tom Scott says this point better than I could in his greatest video, a video that I cannot name. I’m referring to his most viewed video, titled “This Video Has x8 Views.” It bothers me how the only thing the comments say is omg its a miracle the title is still so accurate lol. The point is that some day it won’t be.

He filmed himself before the White Cliffs of Dover which will one day be washed away. The whole video is about the things that were built in the early days of the internet, how they can’t be built anymore, and how what has been built is eroding away too. The internet? Forever? It’s anything but. Things change. Things vanish. Things break.

The clip of Dan Vs. linked above is a prime example of such ephemerality. Despite all the times I’ve watched this scene on YouTube, this was the only clip of it I could find. All those previous uploads are gone. And who knows when this clip will join them.

So is it any wonder people are afraid of technology?

The Library of Babel

There are, of course, books I remember reading. Most recently The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary. It was from a thrift shop next to an arcade I was patronizing, and they were selling this absolutely adorable version of The Art of War. Truly pocket-sized. I think they still sell them. It was only a dollar (as were all other paperbacks9), I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. Pretty boring. I didn’t get much out of it.

Just before that was Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation, a marvelous, marvelous book on what translation really is and what it’s like to do it. I cannot recommend it enough. It provides some nice perspective amidst all the stupid debates about The Odyssey and anime subtitles by people on Twitter who only speak one language.

I started the year by finishing Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. That was an audiobook, narrated by the big man himself. Entertaining as all hell. Listening to his own words in his own voice, it was clear just how far he was from the man who wrote Kitchen Confidential (which I had read the year prior).

At some point in March or February I read Time War (which I loved), Project Hail Mary (which I HATED!!!), and The Left Hand of Darkness (which I absolutely adored). There was that trilogy of books, Steal Like an Artist and the rest, which are very cute reminders of creative advice. To me, they’re compasses: nothing that will break new ground, but will assuredly tell you if you’re going on the right path or not.

Here, in no particular order, is a list of books I remember reading in 2026, along with a few thoughts.

  • Bourdain, Medium Raw
  • Morimi, The Tatami Galaxy
  • Morimi, The Tatami Time Machine Blues
  • Homer (tr. Wilson), The Odyssey
  • Wittgenstein (tr. Kolak), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - No one online ever talks about this translation of the TLP. I’ll probably read another translation of this eventually.
  • Searls, The Philosophy of Translation - Very very very good.
  • Tzu (tr. Cleary), The Art of War - This is one of the books people read just to say they have. I don’t think it’s that applicable to businesses or whatever.
  • Hao, Empire of AI - Phenomenal stuff. Karen Hao is a tech journalist who’s been following the OpenAI story ever since they began all the way to present day. Excellent overview of this messed-up corporation and the messed-up people who run it.
  • Fish, How to Write a Sentence - This one sucks. It focuses too much on the grammatical forms of sentences.
  • Weir, Project Hail Mary - This one REALLY sucks. I could write a whole blog dedicated to why I hate this book, but I’ll save my breath.
  • Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness - Excellent palette-cleanser for the above tragedy. The first chapter alone was miles better than that whole “book.”
  • El-Mohtar and Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
  • Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death - HIGHLY RECOMMEND! Over forty years old yet still relevant.
  • Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
  • hooks, The Will to Change
  • Kleon, The Steal Like an Artist trilogy - Short and sweet.
  • Kinney, Diper Överlöde - Yes, I read a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book as an adult. There was a random tierlist I saw online that put this book next to the first five, which are certified classics. Honestly, I can see why.
  • Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI - Quite sensible guide on how to deal with all this AI stuff.
  • Pratchett, Moving Pictures - I think I read this this year? Maybe last year.
  • McCloud, Understanding Comics - Yeah this is a book why not. Must-read for anyone interested in graphic novels/comics/manga as a medium.
  • Araki, How to Create Villains
  • O’Malley, Seconds
  • …and others.10 11

There’s also the books that I was in the middle of reading, and those I’ve started reading since writing this blogpost.

To help me with writing, I started reading Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway, which I had heard was commonly used as a textbook in college creative writing courses. Great advice in there. I started reading Sula by Toni Morrison when I began drafting this post, and now I’m nearly finished with it. (Magnificent. Incredibly vivid prose.)

I even managed to finish a book: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie in audiobook form. The audiobook narrator is probably a classically trained actor, as the accents he gives the characters are splendid. Except for the accent he gives the locals.

Remembrance of Things Past

As you can see, not all is lost. I forgot the exact quote, but it’s something like “I don’t remember every book I’ve ever read just as I don’t remember every meal I’ve ever had; nevertheless, they are a part of me.” Unlike my current predicament, I could just look the exact words up. But to be on theme, I haven’t.

That quote’s right. The books I’ve read have already given me something. And if I don’t remember a book, it probably wasn’t worth remembering. And writing out that list above made me realize just how much I do remember.

I wish to point out the goal of reading isn’t perfect recall or meeting a quota. The goal of reading is to experience, to feel, to read. I went into my NYR knowing that there was a decent chance I wouldn’t hit 50 books. But even if I didn’t, I still would have read a lot of books. I still would have experienced a lot of things.

No matter what I could have or should have done, the fact remains that I didn’t. And now I have a fresh start. Maybe I can look back every now and then but I have to look ahead. You can only move forward by looking forward. That’s what Danganronpa 2 taught me.

And anyway, NYRs are kinda silly. A wise, curmudgeonly history teacher of mine once pointed out there’s a new year every single day. The 365 days that will pass between today and September 29, 2027 form a year just the same. I could always retry this NYR come 2027, just as so many people do with their own resolutions. But it’s a long, long way to Nochevieja, and I have a long, long list of books I want to read.

So I’m making a resolution today: I’m going to read 50 books in a year.

And this time, I’ll use real Post-its.

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

  1. Henceforth, “NYR.” ↩

  2. 50 is the smallest number that is the sum of two non-zero square numbers in two distinct ways12 ↩

  3. I suppose technically what I’m counting is books finished and not books read. Is that cheating? Whatever, it’s my NYR. I get to make the rules. ↩

  4. Present perfect continuous, but hey who’s counting? ↩

  5. The notion of “damn big” is, of course, relative. If we’re talking about perfect numbers, six is actually the smallest. ↩

  6. Tufts University GNU/Linux User Group.13 Also known more commonly and more boringly as the Linux Club. ↩

  7. Talk about random access. ↩

  8. At the time of publishing this blogpost, x = 77,168,730. And yes, it’s still accurate. ↩

  9. I LOVE THRIFTSTORES!!!!!!!! ↩

  10. Did I include this unnecessary list of books I’ve read just to show off? No.14 I wrote this soon after discovering my original list was gone forever. The first draft of this post was me venting about the situation, and one way I got myself out of that emotional funk was trying to recreate that list. I think there were a little more than 30 entries when it got overwritten. ↩

  11. Ironically, all the section names of this blogpost are books I still haven’t read, but want to. ↩

  12. 49 plus 1, and 25 plus 25. ↩

  13. The S comes from the “slash” in “GNU/Linux.” ↩

  14. Okay, maybe a little. ↩