Towards the end of February, I realized that until that moment, I had read more than a book per week on average in 2019. I had heard about people reading a book per week and always thought it was impossible, but I decided that I would start tracking the books that I read and see how far I would come.
In March, while thinking about a structural solution to the ever-returning question of ‘what to blog about’, I decided to write about the books that I read. This had the added benefit of making what I learned from the books stick.
I’ll throw in the spoiler right here: I read 60 books this year and while I’m proud of the number, it didn’t feel like hard work at all. Reading makes me happy. I feel more relaxed after reading for an hour than I do after watching TV for an hour. Watching TV is the only thing I stopped doing to free up time for reading. I didn’t have to put everything else in my life on hold. It’s almost the opposite. There were several other “projects” that made 2019 a great year.

I started to learn to play the piano in February. As a teenager, I’d had guitar lessons for several years, but I never felt in any way competent or confident playing the guitar and gave up on it eventually. Since falling in love with Tim Minchin and his work and hearing him talk about how much he loves playing the piano I had been tempted to try playing the piano myself. Not to become famous or even ever play in front of an audience. Just for me. In February I made the decision to start small and sensible by renting an electric piano for 6 months.
I had one lesson but unfortunately, the piano teacher’s schedule didn’t align with my (pretty rigid) work schedule. Thankfully I got some good tips, the most impactful being the recommendation of the SimplyPiano app. It’s flexible and easy to use and as the app only uses positive reinforcement it’s also stress-free. The app allows you to play songs pretty much right away and it’s easy to track progress. In August, after 6 months with the rental piano, I decided that I liked (loved) it enough to buy my own piano. I will never be a concert pianist, but I absolutely love playing and I make enough progress to keep me interested (hooked).

In June I agreed to run the 16km “Dam tot Dam” run on September 22nd as part of a team from work. Anyone knowing me a little bit will realize that when entering a race, I don’t just want to finish it, I want to do well. Not to win it, but to run a decent time. I increased my running schedule significantly over the summer to get from my usual 10km to 16km at a decent pace. A bad cold just a few weeks before the race threw me back a bit, but I was able to finish in a decent 1:26:56.

In November I spent most of the month traveling to see Tim Minchin perform in the UK 5 times in 3 different places. I’ve been a big fan of Tim for 4 years, but as he hadn’t toured for 8 years, I hadn’t seen a full live show from him. It was a brilliant, crazy, and ok, somewhat tiring month.

While my reading wasn’t materially impacted by my other adventures, writing a blog post per week has proven to be challenging. Writing a post takes me between 3 and 6 hours. That’s almost a full weekend day. Towards the end of the year, I couldn’t find the self-discipline and motivation to invest that much time every weekend. Overall, I wrote 34 book-related posts since the beginning of March, which I’m happy with.
I’ve also learned that there are some books that don’t have a blog post in them for me. They can be great reads but might just not have enough background story to warrant a complete post. This mostly happens with fiction, as I don’t want to give away any spoilers beyond the basic premises of the book. It has made me decide not to write about books if I don’t have anything worthwhile to say about them. The best examples of this are Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle books. I’ve written about a couple of them and I feel I’ve said everything there is to say about the series. I heartily recommend reading them, both the author and the protagonist are bad-ass women, but I won’t be writing about them anymore.

At the bottom of this post, you’ll find the full list of the books that I’ve read and the blogs I wrote about them. Having read this much I felt I should also list my top picks for this year. I liked most of the books that I read, but these stood out for one reason or another. My top has turned out to be a top 4 and it’s a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction.

• Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller and the best story that I’ve read from him so far is The Graveyard Book. It’s tense and emotional and uplifting and heart-breaking. It’s beautiful and I wish I could read it for the first time again.
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman has been mentioned in at least half of the other non-fiction books that I’ve read this year. It explains why humans behave the way we do. Perhaps if more people read it and understood the implications it would mean we could start thinking a bit more again and shout a bit less.
• The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is based on a real-life story and evokes all the emotions. All the protagonists are women and I still can’t believe how brave these women were. Absolutely stunning.
• Caroline Criado Perez is also a bad-ass woman for writing Invisible Women. This book talks about several situations and places where women are structurally neglected or simply forgotten about. It’s a bit of a depressing, but very important read. And if reading it pulled me down, I can’t imagine how Criado Perez felt while writing it, but we should all be grateful that she did.

I intend to continue reading at approximately the same pace next year. I’m enjoying it and it makes me feel good, so there is no reason not to. On top of that, there is always a list of books that I want to read. More books get added to the list all the time. At the moment the list is 15 books long, but I’m always looking for new ideas, so if you have a book recommendation please let me know what it is.
For now, the plan is to write (and publish) a blog post every two weeks. This will allow me to be a bit more selective when deciding what books I want to write about and it means I can spread the writing effort a bit.

First things first, though. I hope that you have a great New Year’s Eve and I’m wishing you a happy and healthy 2020. I’m looking forward to more books, friendships, music, travel, and beauty when you least expect it.