"My 94-year-old grandmother has kept a list of every book she ever read"

June 3, 2024 12:41 AM

Ben Myers posted to X last year about his grandmother's reading list, and followed it up a year later after her death. This My Modern Met article summarises the tweets.
posted by paduasoy (12 comments total)

My mother has been keeping a list of her reading for about twenty years. Last year she put it into a spreadsheet so she could analyse it. I'm thinking of giving her notebooks to the Mass Observation archive after her death (or they could have the spreadsheet, which would save them some space). I've tried many times to keep my own record, but never make it past May.
posted by paduasoy at 12:44 AM on June 3 [2 favorites]

This is great. What an eclectic collection! What a life!

My 83-year-old father keeps a reading list now (mainly so that he doesn't repeat books unless he wants to). He reads 50+ books a year. I have no idea how long he's been writing them down.

I keep a list too, and have since 1994: book title and author and one-line summary. It's an excellent way to remember what I've been up to; highly recommended. I don't read 50 books a year though.
posted by chavenet at 12:58 AM on June 3 [4 favorites]

Whenever I have kept a list, I've found I'm about 70% re-reads. I'd like to get that down slightly to 65%. I have a habit of buying, and being given, the books I think I'd like to read - and that I do really enjoy if I can manage them! - but falling back on the familiar. Right, have inspired myself, will start list again.
posted by paduasoy at 1:03 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

What often excites me when reading is something new bringing back memories
English, German, Serbian, and Hungarian...
She was also a big fan of poetry, and this love of the form is best expressed in the original poems that she wrote
reminds me of Ágota Kristóf, especially The Notebook, a book which awoke passion in Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian)
posted by HearHere at 2:06 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

I love this! My father likewise kept a reading journal that is now mine, and it’s a very tangible reminder of what he valued in reading.

I’ve tried to keep a reading list or journal, but it really didn’t stick until 2016 or so. That was when I started a “Media Consumption” spreadsheet, including tabs for books, movies, TV, comics, art exhibits/catalogues, and gradually adding picture books, performances, and Did Not Finish. It’s been super-useful for many reasons!
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:39 AM on June 3 [3 favorites]

I realized I clicked through to a link compiling all of Žižek's writings for the Guardian, rather than that one review. Apologies!

Anyway, in searching again for the review I was happy to find a fuller study [pdf] (zizekstudies.org) [content note: Žižek has, of course, come to recognize that the notion of such a traumatic "thing" involves a transcendentalization of the Real, which undermines the possibility of an
effective act]

At various times & in various ways I have kept track of books I read, rarely with a method that might be considered systematic (hey metafilter, this is foreshadowing that ima going to share another book with you; if you've lost interest, stop reading now). Bahktin returned to my attention recently, so I checked out what I could get from the library. Partway through the first book I started, I remembered it was one I'd read before. I suppose having written down the book's title a while back might have kept me from picking it up again. I liked that though, the dawning recognition. I have been keeping better notes, lately. This, for example, is what i just wrote down from the other book the library offered:
Our consciousness can rest... only as an aesthetic consciousness, {Bahktin} reaffirmed. "Meaning [smysl, or the sense of a thing in context] cannot (& does not wish to) change physical, material, or other phenomena," he wrote. "It cannot act as a material force. And it does not need to: it itself is stronger than any force."
~Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, 220
posted by HearHere at 5:37 AM on June 3 [2 favorites]

I started keeping a reading list in February 1992. I can't remember now if I had any specific reason for wanting to do it beyond just "seems like a good idea." The first book on it is A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. The most recent book on the list is All Adults Here by Emma Straub (an author I learned about on Metafilter and decided to check out.) One of the best things about the list is that looking it over is a way of remembering my life, because when I see the book titles I remember where I was when I read them and what was going on in my life. I was in a tent in Patagonia with the wind roaring outside. I was backpacking in British Columbia. I was nursing my baby. I was reading on a bench at the tae kwon do place while my kids had their class.

When my first kid reached kindergarten age I also started listing all the books I read aloud to my kids and then the books they read to themselves, because it was useful for the homeschooling portfolio I had to submit at the end of the year. Those lists have been useful over the years for making kid book recommendations on Ask Metafilter.
posted by Redstart at 7:06 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

I started a reading log on Livejournal in 2005 and it was one of the best new year resolutions I came up with (and stuck to) ever. (It's also on Dreamwidth now but it's the same thing.)

Because it's not a spread sheet, every year or also I would make a summary list of books read in the past year, which is always pretty fun. For instance, I wouldn't have noticed that I had such a long streak with great non-fiction books in the past year:

《演奏之外》
"West with the Night"
"The Wager"
《十年一觉电影梦：李安传》
《老派少女购物路线》
"How Far the Light Reaches"
"The Mushroom at the End of the World"
posted by of strange foe at 7:35 AM on June 3

1,600+ books. One every two weeks on average for 80 years! I have but one question. When did she have time to doom scroll?
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:28 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

I've kept a list of all my finished books since July, 1995. I'm at 1409 and counting!

I started it when I moved to Duluth MN and started working at a used bookstore, which greatly enhanced my library.
posted by RedEmma at 12:05 PM on June 3

I only started doing this in 2020 and I wish I'd been doing it sooner! It's so interesting to look back over the list and see what really left an impression. I have always been a big reader, being able to see my list from decades ago would be fun.

I'm much more reliant on an e-reader than I used to be so I cannot just peruse my burgeoning shelves to remind myself of where I have been.
posted by supermedusa at 12:26 PM on June 3

I began doing this on Goodreads 15 years ago, mostly because my memory was worsening and I didn't want to reread books accidentally. It's also been useful in reminding me of series I may want to finish, and sometimes helps me track down a book I want to recommend to a friend. It never occurred to me that someone else might find it interesting someday, but I'm already at nearly 1000 books; my kids could identify my homesteading phase and different parenting periods and my early pandemic "too spacey to read anything less compelling than a thriller" phase and when my eyesight started to fade (so I started reading less).
posted by metasarah at 12:26 PM on June 3 [1 favorite]