Tag: goodreads

2025 in Books

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I need at least one more hobby. I mean, I have reading, and being a huge nerd about reading, and collecting books. I need a fourth.

According to Goodreads, I read 189 books in 2025, at 87,775 pages. According to Storygraph, I read 189 books in 2025, at 88,360 pages. Let’s call it 88,000 pages, as I’m entirely uninterested in trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the two. At the beginning of this year I started a bunch of different book app accounts and said that I was going to eventually settle on one, and Goodreads and Storygraph scratch slightly different itches, so I spent the year keeping both updated. 88K pages works out to 241 pages a day. How? I read every single night for at least half an hour before going to bed, and on weekends and days off I generally get up between 6:00 and 8:00 and spend a few hours reading in my library. For the record, I’m not trying to get up that early to read; believe me, I’d kill to be able to sleep until noon again if I wanted to. This is one of my body’s ways of showing me I’ve gotten old, apparently, but it’s working out for my reading, I guess.

26 of the books I read were nonfiction, and Storygraph claims I read 5% of them digitally, although I’m not convinced I was especially vigilant about making sure that was recorded properly. I said last year I wanted to read six books about teaching, and didn’t pull that off, mostly because after reading the first one I decided books about teaching were dumb and I didn’t want to read any more of them. I still want to read more nonfiction next year; maybe I’ll shoot for 36 nonfiction books by the end of the year. I definitely want to read more books digitally because my shelves are groaning and I’m genuinely running out of places to store shit. My bookshelves can only get so efficient, y’all, and I don’t think my wife is going to agree to buy a new house.

Average page length was 464 pages, which is another reason I’m thinking about moving more to digital. I read a ton of doorstoppers– according to Storygraph, ten different books were over a thousand pages. That’s nuts.

I read books by 141 authors, 86 of whom were new to me this year. Authors I read more than one book by were:

8 Books: Matt Dinniman

7 Books: Brandon Sanderson

6 Books: Robert Jordan

4 Books: Samantha Shannon, Ryan Cahill

3 Books: Brian McClellan, Megan E. O’Keefe, Wesley Chu, Anthony Ryan, Nghi Vo

2 Books: Keith Ammann, Leigh Bardugo, S.A. Barnes, Suzanne Collins, Osamu Dazai, H.E. Edgmon, K.M. Enright, James Islington, Yume Kitasei, James Logan, John Scalzi, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Xiran Jay Zhao

I’m expecting Robert Jordan to be the big winner next year, as I expect to finish The Wheel of Time, unless it kills me, which it might. Actually, that’s not true, I’m going to finish them even if it does kill me. I’m gonna do it this time, God damn it. I promise. Naomi Novik and Robin Hobb are also going to get a lot of attention.

I didn’t make any particular effort to pay attention to race or gender this year; those repeat authors mean that in terms of raw number of books read I’m absolutely tilted toward white men, but a quick count shows 74 authors who at least immediately scan as female-presenting, which is slightly more than half of the 141 total. There are probably a handful of nonbinary people in there who might move those numbers a bit if I looked closer.

Next year … man, next year all I want to do is get my TBR under control. That’s it. I will probably not manage it.

And, finally, the Big List o’ Covers:

In which I choose violence

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Or “no one is paying attention today, I can say anything I want.” Choose your own blog title!

There’s been a debate raging– well, there’s been a lot of people alternately talking past and yelling at one another– on social media in general and TikTok in particular over the last week or so, and while I generally try to avoid this topic as much as I possibly can, it’s Christmas Day and no one is looking at the internet so if I’m ever going to say something controversial this is the best day to say it.

The debate: audiobooks. The problem: everyone is wrong.

The following are all true. You are welcome to disagree with me but you’re wrong:

  • Listening to an audiobook is not the same thing as reading. You cannot read while you’re driving a car. You cannot read while you’re taking a shower. You cannot read if you cannot read— if I’m reading a book to a toddler, that toddler isn’t reading. You cannot read in the dark. You cannot arbitrarily decide to “read” at one and a half or two times your normal speed. You don’t need electronics or speakers or headphones to read. And reading is a relationship between you and an author, with no third intermediary in between to do a really good job or screw things up.
  • This is not the same thing as discussing whether listening to an audiobook “counts” toward some sort of yearly or monthly reading goal. I don’t give one single merry shit what you decide to count toward your reading goal. I’m going to top out around 180-185 books this year. There are a lot of people who might tell me to my face that that’s impossible. Count whatever you want. I do not care.(*) We aren’t getting prizes for this!
  • Use whatever verbs you want to describe your reading; I also don’t care about that. Tell me you “read” an audiobook when we both know you “listened” to it. It’s whatever. I do not have the mental energy necessary to police language choices on this and it gets awkward in practice anyway. (Similarly, one might say “we read The Cat in the Hat” when discussing a book read to a preliterate toddler. It’s the same phenomenon.)
  • I also don’t care about your reasons for preferring audio to text, whether in general or for any given book. Maybe you just prefer it. Maybe you’re dyslexic. Maybe you don’t have any eyes! I’m not going to ask why you prefer audio and I don’t care. You do you.
  • There is also a weird side argument going on about how it’s possible to read over X number of books a year(**) and still remember everything, which seems like a weird criterion that gets applied to readers and no one else. If you pick a random book off of my shelves and ask me about it, there’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to tell you a whole lot, because depending on the book, I might have read that six years and a thousand books ago, and I also feel like my recall in general is not as good as other people I’ve met who like to read. But let’s apply this logic to, say, sports fans. If I pick one random sports ball game from five years ago that I know you watched and ask you to tell me about it, would you be able to even tell me who won? I mean, you might, especially in, say, college football, where there’s a limited number of games per year, but will you remember the score? Individual plays to discuss? And don’t tell me if I ask you about some random game 3 in a baseball series from 2019 that you’re going to remember anything about it. You just won’t.(***)
  • If it makes you angry that I don’t think listening to an audiobook is reading … why? Why the hell do you care what I think? Go do your thing; it’s okay! I’m not trying to turn you away from your audiobooks! I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to audiobooks! I’m not saying they don’t count, because I don’t care what counts! Audiobooks are lots of things. They just aren’t reading, and if you disagree with me on that, it’s okay. I mean, you’re wrong, but it’s okay! It’s a fine thing to be wrong about. It really seems like, by and large, audiobook people are hugely defensive about their hobby, which has never made any sense to me. You have no reason to care what anyone else thinks about this!

I’ve had a hundred books as my “reading goal” for several years running and I don’t plan on changing that next year. It’s just not that damn important to me, and unless you’re pursuing reading as some sort of self-improvement practice, it probably shouldn’t be all that important to you, either. But if you’re trying to read a dozen books this year because you don’t read much and you want to read more, you’re genuinely doing something different from what I’m doing with a “reading goal,” which is mostly just indulging my mania for categorizing and keeping track of everything. There was no “Yay, I did it!” moment when I hit that 101st book. I shot for 200 one year to see if I could do it and I did, and I think that’s as excited as I ever plan on getting for a “reading goal” and I don’t plan to repeat the experiment.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, go yell at me in the comments.

(*) I did encounter one person who claimed she read over fourteen hundred books in 2025, and while my response is unlikely to be “oh, no you didn’t,” I am rather intensely curious about how, precisely, she arrived at that number. Again, I’m fully aware that most people think my 180ish is impossible. I feel like if I adjusted my standards for what “counts” or made a deliberate shift toward shorter books, I could significantly increase that amount. For example, if I counted individual issues of comic books as “books”, which I don’t, that’s probably about another 250-300 books a year without making any changes in my reading. Now, when I do that and it only brings me to a third of this person’s total … again, I’m not gonna argue, because they can say whatever they want, but I’m curious about how they arrived at that number. Maybe they do slush reading for a children’s book company or something. I dunno.

(**) This, I think, is very similar to the dynamics of driving, where anyone driving faster than you are at that particular moment is a maniac. I know I can read X number of books per year, but anyone reading 1.2X has got to be lying!

(***) Maybe you will! I’ll be impressed. Some people are impressive!

Where to find me on the Internets: 2025 Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek2 Comments

I chose that image because I am convinced that you’re supposed to see the word “fucking” in the first five logos, despite the Instagram image being in the way, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the rest of it.

Anyway, I haven’t done a social media roundup in a while, and I keep turning things off, so in the absence of anything else to talk about (that said, I’m ranting on Bluesky right now) let’s list off my accounts.

  • Infinitefreetime.com. You’re here now. If you’re not here right now I’m very confused. This is the only one of these accounts that is never ever Going Away.
  • Microblogging is handled on Bluesky, at @infinitefreetime.com. I will probably cross over 3000 followers this weekend. Whee!
  • I really really really want more StoryGraph followers, so if you use that app, please send me a friend request at, wait for it, infinitefreetime. I’ll follow you back! I promise!
  • I’m still on Goodreads! My profile picture there is ancient and I should update it.
  • I’m not updating my YouTube channel any longer, but you can find it at lutherplaysgames.com anyway. You never know, I might get back into it eventually.

God, is that it? I think that’s it. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, Google+. was never actually real, I don’t recognize that green app up there, and I don’t really post on TikTok so I don’t need any followers over there. I shut down my Mastodon account and was never on Threads. I’m on Reddit, but don’t post very often? I don’t even know if Reddit really has any follower/friend features.

Anyway, point is, go follow me on Bluesky and Storygraph. Please.

2024 in Books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

Well, this is just ludicrous.

According to Goodreads, I read 185 books in 2024, comprising a grand total of 81,191 pages, or 221.83 pages per day. That’s assuming I finish Katherine Addison’s The Grief of Stones tonight, which I’m going to, because I have to start reading The Way of Kings tomorrow and I want to be halfway through that big bastard by the end of the day.

(It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow and we will have family in town. That’s not gonna happen. I’m going to shoot for it regardless.)

With the exception of video games, I went full hermit this year, abandoning nearly all of my hobbies or media consumption except for reading. I have read for half an hour before going to bed at the end of the night for my entire life, and I think I stretched that to an hour this year, and I started reading with my morning coffee on Saturday and Sundays, meaning that my “morning coffee” would regularly last from whenever I got up to lunchtime. So yes, I read a lot faster than most people, but I also spend a whole damn lot of time with a book in my hand. Estimating an eleven-hour-a-week minimum would not be unreasonable at all, and I strongly suspect if I were to ever calculate any such thing it would be more than that.

My average book, by the way, was 439 pages. I actually did hit 200 books one year because I decided to; this year I genuinely wasn’t aiming at any particular number. I bet I could have done 250 if I had selected for shorter books, but I didn’t want to. Only 13 of those 185 books were nonfiction, which is shockingly low even knowing how hard I focused on series fiction this year– I’m shooting for 20% of my books next year being nonfiction, if you didn’t see the update to my reading goals in my previous post.

I read books by 124 authors this year, of which 86 were new to me, which is surprisingly high, especially once we get to how many books by each author I read. Without even looking, I’ll tell you right now that the author I read the most books by is Adrian Tchaikovsky, totaling …

… (looks at Goodreads list) …

Jesus, ten books. Other authors showing up more than once:

Six books: Pierce Brown

Five books: J.R.R. Tolkien, James Tynion IV

Four books: John Gwynne, TJ Klune

Three books: Thiago Abdalla, R.J. Barker, David Dalglish, J.S. Dewes, Robin Hobb, Jay Kristoff, Josh Malerman, Andrea Stewart, Richard Swan

Two books: Susan Abulhawa, Josiah Bancroft, Carissa Broadbent, Shannon Chakraborty, Rin Chupeco, Piper CJ, Rachel Gillig, John Keay, Judy Lin, Vaishnavi Patel, Ava Reid, Samantha Shannon, M.L. Wang

I thought about doing a gender breakdown, but it broke my brain. I have a bunch of authors with initials for first names, and a lot of the time I don’t immediately know those folks’ gender, and then you throw in the enbies and that’s more research than I really want to do. I’m about to show you the whole list anyway, so you can look for yourself if you want. :-). Of the 29 authors I read more than one book by, I’m certain 14 are men and 13 are women and yes, I know that doesn’t add up to 29 and I still might be wrong on a couple of them. For whatever that might be worth.

Pretty covers time? Pretty covers time. Click on ’em for gallery view:

2025 Reading Goals

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

I was hoping to get to the stats nerdery post today, but I took a nap this afternoon with a cat on my chest, so it’s just going to be this. 2024 was one of the heaviest reading years of my life, and it was a year with no particular reading goal beyond “whatever I want” and “clear my TBR shelf,” which not only never happened, it never came close to happening. I want next year to have a little bit more focus, and I’m going to throw one ridiculous challenge at myself in January just for the sheer hell of it.

Reading Goal the First: In January 2025, I will read all five of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives books, plus the two supplemental novellas. That is, according to Wikipedia, 6,335 pages. I have read the first two books and part of the third. My guess is that if I can get through Oathbringer this time without the issues I had the last time I picked it up, I’ll be fine; 204 pages a day during a month where I have one three-day weekend and don’t have work until the 6th is not even a particularly demanding pace. That said, shit happens. We’ll see if I can pull this off.

Reading Goal the Second: Setting a number of books goal is almost meaningless at this point, but let’s go with 100 again. Most years I don’t have to push too much to hit that number, and unless I rediscover some other hobbies I’ll blow it away again, but I don’t want to set it so high that I start adjusting what I’m reading to hit a number. That said …

Reading Goal the Third: At least 22 nonfiction books over the course of the year. Why 22? That’s two a month if you ignore January. I may adjust this after I look a little bit more closely at what I read in 2024; I’m pretty sure I didn’t read that many nonfiction books this year and I want to up the number somewhat.

Reading Goal the Fourth: At least six of those 22 books must be about teaching and, ideally, teaching math. I joined the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics this year and one of the benefits of that membership is deep discounts on their professional library, which is good; that said, these books tend to be hellaciously dry so I’m not going to commit to too much. Six is one every other month. That’s not bad at all.

Oh, and one more thing: Starting with January 1st, I’m going to start looking into moving away from housing everything at Goodreads. I’m going to start simultaneously recording my reading on Goodreads, Storygraph and Bookly, and we’ll see which app wins out. Right now Storygraph looks pretty cool because it appeals to the numbers nerd in me and there appear to be a thousand ways to generate charts and spreadsheets and such from your reading, and really, if you can’t make a spreadsheet out of something, is it even worth doing? I’ll report back on this as I get into what the different apps can do.

That’s what I’ve got for right now. Do you have any plans for your reading next year?

2023 in Books

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I am running out of days in which to write pithy retrospectives or overly detailed nerd epics about blog stats, and I’m starting to think that I’m going to spend all of New Year’s Eve writing and generate a dozen of them. I just put together my top 11 books of the year (I couldn’t fit it into 10, but 15 felt like pushing it this year) and I’ll probably write that tomorrow, but we’ll see how energetic I’m feeling. 

But let’s talk about what I read this year anyway. I read more this year than any year since 2015, I think, which I believe was the year where I read 200 books just to prove I could, and I’m probably not done– I started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Blood of the Mantis today, and I can easily imagine a world where I read both that and the fourth book in his Shadows of the Apt series before the calendar year rolls over. So 140 books this year and it might end up being 141. Goodreads tells me that I’m at 52,188 pages for the year, with an average book being 372 pages long– and that’s in a year where I read all 25 volumes of Invincible, at about 160 pages each. I was about to type a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do the math to figure out what a difference the graphic novels made, but then I went and did it anyway. Without those, it’s 419 pages per book.

Which, uh, can you tell I focused on fantasy/sci-fi series fiction this year? Because holy shit. I am trying my damnedest to clear my TBR right now, and I’m seriously thinking about making a rule that I can’t buy anything other than sequels to series I’ve started until the damn shelf is either clear for the first time in several years or really close to it. I’ve got a few books on preorder that I’m not about to cancel but if I don’t make any discretionary purchases in 2024 until I’ve got it cleared … hell, that’s still probably three months, easy. Sigh.

I read 48 books this year by authors who were new to me, and read more than one book by fifteen different authors. The big winner there was Robert Kirkman, who wrote the Invincible series (25 books), but beyond him there was Adrian Tchaikovsky (10, possibly 11), John Gwynne (4), Neal Shusterman (3), Matthew Ward (3), Josiah Bancroft, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, Cassandra Khaw, TJ Klune, Fonda Lee, Seanan McGuire, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Christopher Ruocchio, Nghi Vo, and Rebecca Yarros, all with 2.

And my TBR has even more books from, like, half of those authors. Whee!

The total number of authors represented was 92, of which at least 37– 40%– are women or nonbinary and at least 27– 29%– were people of color. The 40% isn’t bad, although I’d like it to be higher, but the 29% is. At least 40 (43%) were white males. (Why “at least”? I can’t find a picture of every author, and I’m not going to spend a million years digging so there are a couple of assumptions in there. There are a couple of trans men in the mix as well, I think.) I’m not going to cross-reference that with the number of books because of the number of series I read; Tchaikovsky and Kirkman alone are going to skew the hell out of that and a clear majority of the books I read were by white men. I’m not going to make an explicit goal of it but I’d like to see the numbers higher next year for people who aren’t straight white men in general.

Anyway, look at all the pretty covers!

On the current state of my social media

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I don’t know how necessary this post really is, but it’s been knocking around in my head for a week or two now and I haven’t written it yet, so screw it, let’s go. Here’s where I am across the Web and how those accounts are doing:

  • The blog, infinitefreetime.com itself. I’ve been here almost ten years and I’m going nowhere. Traffic is way down from last year but still getting about 100 hits a day. WordPress also tells me it sends out about 10,000 emails every time I post, but I don’t know if it actually counts if those people read the post in their browsers (I kinda doubt it) and I don’t know how many of those accounts are actually alive; I feel like that should turn into way more than 100 hits per day if they’re real. I will keep yammering into this space until the internet itself shuts down.
  • Twitter, @nfinitefreetime. 10,597 followers, a number that drops by a few every day for no clear reason but who appear to be actual live accounts. Twitter has all sorts of problems but I love it, and it provides an outlet for Politics Luther, which keeps him away from the blog most of the time and (much more importantly) keeps him from ranting at my wife all the Goddamned time. All of my old tricks for gaining followers stopped working right after I hit 10K on this account and nothing I’ve been able to do since then (and that was a couple of years ago now) has really moved the needle much.
  • TikTok, @lutherteachesmath. As of this exact second, 7,744 followers, a number that continues to creep upward slowly despite the fact that I’m not posting too often. I keep almost killing this account, because I don’t trust TikTok as an entity at all– I’ve known too many creators who had their accounts suddenly permabanned for no fucking reason at all to be willing to think of this site as anything more than a flash in the pan that’ll be gone in a few years. This is, for those of you who care about such things, the first time I’ve linked to my TikTok from the blog since I took my real name out of it. I figure the issue isn’t people going from here to there isn’t an issue; what I don’t want is people going from there to here, which is why the word “Siler” appears nowhere on the TikTok.
  • Goodreads, right here. I have 722 “friends” and 110 “followers” on the site, but to be honest I really don’t use Goodreads as a social media site at all; I use it as an online database to keep track of my various reading projects. I approve every friend request I’m sent and don’t interact with other people there at all unless I know them from somewhere else. That said, if you want to see what I’m reading and the other half-dozen ways I have available to do it don’t work for you, I’m probably not going anywhere anytime soon from here either.
  • YouTube, lutherplaysgames.com. Currently 22 subscribers and also currently absorbing more of my mental energy than any other site I use. I am going to have to dial back how often I’m posting once school starts but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun with it right now. I know I’ve been yammering about it a lot lately but you really should come say hello.
  • Patreon, right here. Currently sixteen very patient Patrons; this site is all but defunct and I haven’t charged my Patrons in forever. I should probably just shut it down but I feel like everyone who is still supporting me deserves a free book if I ever write another one (Click doesn’t count, because that’s a reward for the $2 level and everyone got one when I made it available anyway) and I’m just trying to remember to cancel billing every month until that actually happens.

I have permanently shut down my Facebook account and haven’t missed it, and along with that I also shut down my Instagram account, which I admit I do kind of miss. If anybody wants to recommend a photo-posting site other than Insta or Snapchat, feel free, especially anything Facebook doesn’t own. I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed anything I currently have an account on, or at least anything I’m paying attention to. Any fun communities out there I should be a part of? Go follow me on everything that exists!

2020’s reading recap

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

First things first: are we friends on Goodreads? This site has transitioned more and more into a books-and-video-games site over the last couple of years, so if you’re still reading but not following me on GR you really ought to be.

In terms of quantity of books read, I had basically the same year as last year– around 50K pages, currently 138 books, possibly to hit 139 if I manage to finish The Lightning Thief before bed. Here’s the entire list:

Uuuuugggghhhh Eloquent Rage is in that list twice. Well, fine, 137-138 books, then, assuming everything that should be there is there. I’m not worrying about it. It’s a lot.

More numbers: 69 of the books I read, nearly exactly half, were by authors who were new to me. The big winner this year was S.L. Huang, who I read four different books by; other authors who I read more than one book from include Rachel Caine, Rin Chupeco, Daniel Ford, Claudia Gray, Kevin Hearne, Justina Ireland, N.K. Jemisin, R.F. Kuang, Seanan McGuire, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Tamsyn Muir, Mark Oshiro, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Emily Tesh and John Wyndham. As usual, I didn’t do enough rereading this year. I always feel like I didn’t do enough rereading, though, so … whatever. I ended up reading 62 books by women of color, so I assume once you add in the white women a solid majority of my reading was by women this year. Roughly 30 were by white men.

Minor update to the #readaroundtheworld project: I am a data nerd; you know this, because look at this post, and so I’ve decided that every book counts, because that means that at the end of the year I get to notice that I read four books by Texans but only three from Michiganders and pretend that means something. I’m still trying to fill the map up as best I can, so expect a post one year from now that once again says that I didn’t do enough rereading, but there’s no reason not to just nerd out on book geography for everything rather than trying to find the One True Representative for each country. I’ve already caught myself thinking about arranging the order of the books I’m reading so that I get somebody cool to represent the UK and not some rando and I just can’t be about that life right now, so I’ll keep track of all of them. Authors from underrepresented countries will still get featured on Instagram, but I’m not going to do every book.

Still might be one more post today, but it won’t pop until tonight if it does.