I’m trying to learn how many books, and which ones, I’ve read in my life. I’m 39 years of age. But this has been a minor obsession of mine since 2015. On Goodreads, I tried to recount and list every book I could remember reading. But it added up to a paltry 258 books. That’s it?! That’s nowhere near where I feel I should be. And as I write this, I’m getting schpilkes thinking that instead of writing this I could be reading another book…

But anyways, do you have a list of all the books you’ve read? How many? How did you recall them all? Is there some method, there must be, in this age, to discover every book. I don’t know. Goals are nice. Reading is a fantastic pleasure. There may be nothing better. Even with a mediocre book, or a storyline you can kind of predict, or a narrative style you recognize from dozens of other books you’e read, there’s something so primordial about lying in bed, alone, late at night, in silence, just running over the words, conjuring the images, in your quietude.

A next generation of humans beyond Homo Sapiens might find our reading thing charming. They might find a lot of our activties quaint and charming. Cute little things we lower-level creatures did to pass our lives, enjoy a moment. But you know, it’s all relative. Experience nor happiness is measured by level of intelligence. We all have our gifts. Snails, flowers, orangutangs, homo sapiens, and the beings of the future, we all have to deal with existence, the sorrows and joys. The unknown of it all.

Yours,

Jedediah Smudge