I pulled out the very first diary, an Avery Record Book which I got in an office supply store in Sherman Oaks, California. It’s a slim volume because I was counting my pennies back then. I turned to the first page and read what I had written.

The very first thing I mentioned in that first entry was that I had finished read I. Asimov, Isaac Asimov’s posthumously published memoir (a retrospective follow up to his massive 1980 double-volume autobiography). This was my 3rd time reading the book. I also mentioned starting to read Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, which it turned became one of my favorite Heinlein books. I mentioned seeing the movie Babe. And I concluded the entry with a renewed desire to write science fiction stories and, someday, see them published.

I have been working slowly over the last year or so to transcribe and digitize these diaries as part of my personal digital archive. The archive now contains digitized schoolwork and artwork going back to kindergarten, and email going back to October 18, 1994—even before my diary. Indeed, as of the this morning, the archive contains more than a quarter of a million messages. By the time my diary is fully digitized, I’d expect there to be about 10,000 entires. I also have more than 7,000 blog posts archived there a well, making the archive a comprehensive collection of my output during my lifetime.

There is another coincidence today: The Artemis II / Orion spacecraft and crew will surpass Apollo 13’s distance record from Earth later today, and head behind the moon, the first time humans have done so in 54 years. I’ve been following the mission assiduously, and I can’t help but think that Isaac Asimov would have been delighted by this mission. Even more incredible than 30 years of diary entries is that fact that once again, we’ve gone to the moon.

The new typewriter arrived yesterday and what a joy it is!

Admittedly, I originally set out to get a manual typewriter, but those seemed much harder to come by than a new Royal. Besides, I wanted a typewriter that was in working condition, not for show. As it turns out, the model that I got has some advanced features, including a screen that you can see what you’re typing before it types it on the page so you can make corrections. I have avoided this feature so far. After spending about an hour learning the basics, I obtained a set of blank postcards, and set about writing half a dozen notes to friends and family on my new machine. I made two surprising discoveries:

1. I am not nearly as good a typist as I think I am when editing capabilities and auto-correct are taken out of the picture. I type fast, but I make a typo every 3 or 4 lines of text. This discovery is a blessing in disguise: by using the typewriter, I think I can make myself a better typist.
2. When I get into a rhythm, with the staccato RAT-TAT-TAT of my typing as background music, I get what I only describe as an endorphin rush that spurs me on, and is like nothing I’ve ever felt typing on a computer keyboard and watching the words appear on a screen.
   

There are a few useful features that I’ve already made use of. The device has a whopping 16K of text memory, which can be used to store text files, or format settings. I’ve used it for the latter, setting up my margins and tab for standard letter paper, as well as 4×6 postcards. This makes it convenient to easily switch formatting settings based on my task. The typewriter can produce underlined text, bold text, and 3 different text pitches. It can auto-center a line, and right-justify a line. It has word correction features that make use of the correction tape, but I haven’t played around with that yet, preferring the old-fashioned X-ing out of my mistakes. This gives me visual cues of my progress over time.

I’m excited to put my new toy to more use. The feeling I got when I used it yesterday was just wonderful. As I sit here typing these words into my laptop, I am imagining typing them into my new typewriter. It is not the same.

— Arlington, Virginia

1. I have a manual Royal typewriter circa 1950, which I inherited from my grandfather, but it is no longer in working condition. ︎
2. Someone will note that I could also simply write longhand and at a significantly lower cost. The fact is I do write longhand, every day, in my diaries. That gives my hand and wrist enough of a workout. ︎

Over the December holidays, I read Louis Menand’s article on dictionaries, “Look It Up¹” in The New Yorker. The article referred to a book by Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary and who can resist a book on dictionaries? So, sitting poolside, I read Fatsis’s book with pleasure and fascination. Both the article and book raise the debate on what a dictionary is and should be, and both assume the death of the print dictionary thanks to how easy it is to look up a word online.

It was during the December holidays of 1978 that I received from my parents, the Macmillan Dictionary for Children. I was fast approaching 7 years old, and as you might imagine, a dictionary is not a gift that rouses the excitement of an almost-seven-year-old boy. This point was emphasized when my younger brother opened his gift, which was the Grease LP. We’d seen Grease over the summer and glancing between my dictionary and his LP, I felt a growing dismay that perhaps my parents thought if I had been given any other gift, I’d shoot my eye out.

It turned out, however, that the Macmillan Dictionary for Children was one of those life-changing books for me: I have never been without a dictionary since.

I still have a copy² of Macmillan Dictionary for Children, with its white cover and black lettering, except for the word “children” which was emphasized in red, as if an adult might mistake this for a “real” dictionary. It was real enough for me. After some initial trepidation, I explored it frequently. It was the heaviest book I’d encountered, weighing in at 750+ pages when all I was used to was the 30 or so pages of a Dr. Seuss book.

The dictionary was entirely self-contained, with instruction in the prefatory matter for how to use it, which I read as a way of figuring things out. Interestingly, the section on “How to Look Up Words” discussed alphabetical order, but made no reference to “guide words.” I don’t know when or how I learned to use guide words when looking up a word, but it is second nature to me today, and I’ve borrowed the concept in my own work. My notebook containing the list of books I’ve read since 1996 has “guide dates” at the top left and right of facing pages.

As a kid, the lush and colorful illustrations made the dictionary a joy to flip through. Flipping through it now, it seems like there are at least two illustrations per page. Indeed, the back-matter lists “1,200” illustrations in color.

The definitions are clear and simple, and made use of frequent examples. For instance, the definition of melt is:

1. To change from a solid to a liquid by heating. The warm sun _melted_ this ice on the pond.

2. To slowly become liquid; dissolve. The lump of sugar _melted_ in the coffee.

This definition sticks in my memory because when I read it, I thought that a better example in the second definition would have been “Dorothy accidentally melted the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water.” (The Wizard of Oz was a holiday favorite of mine when I was six years old.)

That dictionary omitted some words. Peninsula is followed immediately by Penitentiary while Vacuum Cleaner is followed by Vague. Looking back, it seems odd to me that a dictionary for children would leave out important definitions for human reproductive anatomy. It only raised the mystique of the words when they didn’t appear in the dictionary.

I was an assiduous looker-upper of words, and frequently tried to make sense of how to properly pronounce them, using the pronunciation guide at the lower right corner of each page. That took some parsing, and to this day, I still have to slow down to parse the cryptic pronunciation symbols to get to the suggested pronunciation of a word. Looking up words in the Macmillan did not give me a sense of where the word came from. I had to wait for a later dictionary before I could appreciate etymology.

Sometime in high school, or perhaps, as a freshman in college, I obtained Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which was my go-to volume for many, many years.

Today, of course, spelling-checkers—a prime use case for a dictionary—are virtually built into operating systems, as are dictionaries for looking up the definition of words. And of course, the Internet is there for anyone who can access it to find word definitions and even hear pronunciations. Thus, the death knell³ of the printed dictionary. With the tapping of a few keys, or even a voice query to Siri or Alexa, one can have the definition and spelling of any word in a second or two.

For me, there is a joy to looking things up. Maybe it is because I have done this my whole life. Looking up words online or asking an agent to define them for me is like visiting a museum or an⁴ historic site online. It is not the same as traveling there, walking through cavernous halls, or marble ruins. I enjoy the work of pulling the heavy volumes from the shelf beside my desk, rummaging through the pages, to find what I am looking for, reminded of the previous expeditions I’ve made by the yellow highlights I see as the pages flip by. I enjoy the serendipity that frequently accompanies these lexicographical jaunts, encountering words or meanings that I might have missed had I asked Siri to define a word for me. I like comparing definitions between dictionaries. There is a joy in finding the precise word for the context—something that occasionally annoys friends and family when I use a word that no one else is familiar with.

For many years, I had a single dictionary on my shelves. These days my working reference shelf abounds with ten dictionaries. There is the New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition which is my go-to volume these days. I still have my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

Years ago, I added Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage edited by Jeremy Butterfield and touted as “Fowler for the 21st Century.” However, I don’t use that volume very often. I obtained an older edition, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition on the recommendation of one of my favorite essayists, Andy Rooney. In his essay, “Pardon My English⁵,” Rooney writes:

The best book on how to use the English language was written by an Englishman named H. W. Fowler in 1926. Modern English Usage is one of the great books ever written. It is the English language Bible.

This is a rousing recommendation all by itself, but Rooney goes on to add:

Professor Burchfield⁶ has ruined the original by eliminating all Fowler’s delightful little idiosyncrasies without adding any flavor of his own. It’s an acceptable book but no better than a lot of other books on grammar and I resent Burchfield trading on Fowler’s name. Why didn’t he call it Burchfield’s Modern English Grammar and see how many he’d sell?

Other dictionaries on my shelf include The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (fifth edition), The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, and Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words & Phrases. In addition, I have the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. For tossing into my backpack when I travel or leave the house for a period of time, I have a paperback The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Rounding out my reference books are The Concise Dictionary of Quotations, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, Merriam-Webster’s Word-for-Word Spanish-English Dictionary, and The Oxford Atlas of the World.

When I write, these volumes are frequently sprawled open around me. When I read, I usually have a dictionary at hand. It is rare these days when I encounter a word I don’t know, but sometimes, a word is used in an unfamiliar context, or even in an incorrect context, and I have the dictionary there to check. It is easy, convenient, and less distracting than pulling out my phone to look up a word.

This fascination with words, with dictionaries, with language, and the joy I find in writing likely stem from thoughts and ideas spurred by the Macmillan Dictionary for Children I received when I was six years old. It seemed an odd gift at the time, but it has paid enormous dividends. A few years ago, when my youngest daughter was seven years old, I got her a new edition of Macmillan’s. I prepared her for it, and she took to it much faster than I had. I still find it out on her floor every now and then, proof that she is making use of it, even just to explore and browse.

1. Published as “Is the Dictionary Done For?” in the online edition. ︎
2. My copy is a “revised” edition. I don’t know what happened to my original. ︎
3. My New Oxford American Dictionary defines death knell as “the tolling of a bell to mark someone’s death; used to refer to the imminent destruction or failure of something.” p. 446. ︎
4. The debate that rages on the use of “a” or “an” before a word that begins with “h” is legendary. The modern Fowler’s suggests: “the standard modern approach is to use a (never an) together with an aspirated h (a habitual, a heroic, a historical)” The earlier Fowler’s is a little more tolerant, but stresses that if you say “an historical” you shouldn’t pronounce the “h” sound, so “an -istorical.” I prefer the latter. ︎
5. Common Nonsense, p. 181. ︎
6. The Butterfield edition that I have is not the same as the Burchfield edition Rooney refers to, but the coincidence of names and the excuse to acquire yet another dictionary led me to obtain the 1965 Fowler version at a Church book sale. And I do prefer it to the Butterfield. ︎

1. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean (2025)

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Susan Orlean’s memoir is the big winner this year, coming in first place with her memoir of becoming a writer, and an intimate and funny look at the writer’s life that was engrossing, fascinating, and a pleasure to read and absorb. Highly recommended for writers and non-writers alike.

2. Emerson: Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson (1996)

University of California Press
Isaac Asimov’s famous story, “Nightfall” begins with this quote from Emerson:

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God.

I haven’t read much Emerson, but this year, I came across this wonderful biography of Emerson by Robert D. Richardson, particularly fascinating because of its emphasis on Emerson’s notebooks and how he used them to think. This was one of those rare biographies from which many practical lessons are easily extracted.

3. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey, 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins (2019)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Way back in the summer of 1998, back when I thought I might actually try to be an astronaut, I picked up a used copy of Michael Collins’ memoir, Carrying the Fire at a bookshop in northern New Jersey. I read it then, and thought it unlike many of the astronaut memoirs at the time in both its detail and candor. This year, I re-read it and that reading solidified in my mind that it is the best of the astronaut memoirs and biographies I have read—and I have read quite a few of them over the decades.

4. Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg (2007)

Baen Books
I re-read Breakfast in the Ruins in December, about a year after my friend and mentor Barry N. Malzberg passed away. Reading it reminded me of what a fantastic mind Malzberg had, what a powerful writer he was, so different in style from many science fiction writers. I also saw more clearly what it was he was trying to achieve within the genre—to show that it could be just as respectable and powerful as its literary cousins. The book stirred many questions that I wished I could have asked Barry, either in email or on the walks we took in the parking lot at Readercon.

5. History Matters by David McCullough (2025)

Simon & Schuster
When David McCullough passed away, we lost a phenomenal writer and historian of American culture and innovation. I recall an interview with him where he said he had about 20 projects he would like to get to, and when he died, I was sad because I figured I’d seen the last of his writing. So it was with surprise and delight that I learned of a new book, History Matters, which was a posthumous collection of previously unpublished essays and speeches on history, education, and other important matters of the day. Reading this reminded me of the power of McCullough’s thoughts and words. How we could use them today!

6. Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (2025)

Knopf
I grew up in the computer age. I got my first computer when I was 11 or 12—a Commodore VIC-20, and learned to program from the listings in computer magazines. In high school I got a DOS machine, which I used through college. My favorite word processor—Word for DOS 5.5—was a Microsoft product. So it was fun to read a memoir of the man who brought Microsoft to life as a company and led it through the early days of the Internet.

7. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (2019)

Dey Street Books
Alec Nevala-Lee and I have shared an issue of ANALOG (June 2011) and have been on at least one panel together at a science fiction convention. Back in 2019 I saw that he’d written a book on the history of the Golden Age of science fiction, but for some reason, I didn’t read it at the time. I read it in December 2025, initially with some trepidation. After all, I had written more than 40 episodes of my Vacation in the Golden Age, and had read Asimov’s autobiographies countless times, and right or wrong, activities such as these give one a feeling of propriety. Foolish, of course, and I was absolutely delighted by Alec’s fascinating book on the Golden Age. I was humbled, too, learning much more about the people who made the Golden Age than I thought I knew. A must-read for any science fiction fan, but also for a fan of how a literary movement is born, and becomes a cultural phenomenon.

Earlier in the year, I read another great book by Alec, Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs, which was a biography of Luis Alvarez, and a book I wholeheartedly recommend.

8. King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: The Diaries of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles by Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles (2020)

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
I can’t recall what brought me to this book—except, perhaps, that I was searching for diaries. “Tommy” Lascelles was a private secretary to the British Royal Family and his diaries provide a fascinating peek behind the curtain during the Second World War.

— Boynton Beach, Florida

Did you have books you really enjoyed in 2025? Let me know about them in the comments.

Here are some best reads from previous years: 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

1. In keeping with previous Best Reads posts, I’m limiting my list to the top 10 percent of my reads, so 8 books in this case. ︎

I began the keeping the list on January 1, 1996, while on a visit to my grandparent’s in New York. I’ve kept it, in one form or another, ever since, both on paper and online.

I’ll admit to sneaking in a few short books toward the end, in order to cross the 1,500 book mark, but that is balanced by the many overly long books I read earlier in the year. (The year began with the one-two punch of Brandon Sanderson’s titanic Wind and Truth and Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend.) And today, to balance things further, I began reading The New York Times Book of the Dead: 320 Obituaries of Extraordinary People, a massive book that will likely take me the better part of a week to get through.

Today, I am celebrating my milestone, and looking ahead, hoping that over the course of the next 30 years I’ll add another 2,500 books to the list (the extra thousand because I’ll be retired more than two-thirds of that time).

Coming soon: my favorite reads of 2025. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

— Bonita Springs, Florida

Since the fall of 1994 I have spent the better part of 8 hours a day (at minimum) with my eyes on screens. This trend took a jump around 2008 or so with the advent of smartphones and similar devices. Imagine! One third of a typical day spent looking at screens. Factor in 8 hours of sleep (generous, I admit) and at least half of my waking hours for the last 31+ years has been spent looking at screens. I am tired of it. Exhausted by screens might be a better characterization. Screen weary is more poetic. Beginning in 2026, I am resolved to cut as much of my screen time as possible, going from screen weary to screen wary. This is easier said than done.

My day job still requires me to look at screens. Indeed, I have three screens in my office over which I divide the various work I am engaged in: a screen for email and messages, another “working screen” and a third for reference or meetings. As I still have a few years to go before I retire, there is no way I can avoid these screens. But already, throughout 2025 I have been slowly breaking my bond with other screens. I’ve stepped away from hobby coding. After thirty-five years of hobby coding, I’m more than ready to retire from that. I try to do much of my reading on paper books. I subscribe to a pile of paper magazines just so that I have some additional reading options that are not on a screen. I don’t take many photos with my phone any longer—preferring to live in the moment. I’ve all but abandoned social media.

In 2026 I’m looking to step away from screens further. Indeed, in an ideal world, the only time I would find myself on screens (outside of work) would be when writing for the blog, composing final drafts of other writing (with earlier drafts done on paper¹), occasional calls and texts with family and friends, and of course, a movie or TV show now and then. (On an actual TV rather than my phone or laptop.) My journal is already on paper. I have an appointment book that substitutes for my calendar (updated weekly from the family calendar). Even my notes, which have historically gone into Obsidian as plain text, are going onto scraps of paper which I manually index. All in an effort to cut down my screen time.

I have no particular aim beyond cutting the time as much as practical. I’ve been using my vacation as a kind of experiment and found that in the first week of vacation, my screen time averaged 2 hours and 14 minutes. Last week, not counting work time, my screen time was more than double that, at 4 hours and 36 minutes, meaning my eyes were looking at screens more than 12 hours a day. The week before that my non-work screen time averaged 6 hours! If I can manage non-work screen time below 2 hours a day for 2026, I’ll call that a victory. And a start.

1. Or better yet, a good old fashioned typewriter. ︎

I’ve been thinking about Barry a lot this last week, as I re-read his magnificent collection of essays, Breakfast in the Ruins, a book I first read in 2007, but even before that, I’d read his The Engines of the Night—which makes up the first half of Breakfast—a lifetime ago this month, December 1998. His essays on science fiction resonate more with me today than they did in my youth. I feel I understand and empathize with his central complaint of the genre more than I ever did before. I came to the genre as he did, and my trajectory, not nearly as meteoric, prolific, or bright, turned me off to the genre for a long time.

That arc was fueled first by a sense of wonder, and later by the realization that I had some ability to put a story together. As I read more about the people behind the stories, the arc was fueled by a desire to be like them, to join the ranks, as Jack Williamson put it to Asimov on a postcard. When I finally did join the ranks, the arc flattened. The achievement dulled the work. Conversations were no longer about the literature of s.f., they were about editors, word rates, SFWA business meetings, unacceptable contract clauses, the politics of science fiction, which was the politics of society writ large. No one, it seemed, wanted to talk about the stories; mechanics, yes, work methods, plotter or pantser, absolutely, but not about the work, not about how science fiction was or could be just as powerful as its literary counterpart. Not even I. From there, after I achieved the “cover” for the May 2015 issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show for my story “Gemma Barrows Comes to Cooperstown”, there was a rapid descent, the drogue shoot failed and while I survived reentry, I plummeted into he sea for reasons at the time I did not fully understand.

Re-reading Breakfast in the Ruins has helped to clarify this. I was trying, with my stories to write literary stories that had a science fiction background for convenience of market. With few exceptions, the tropes of science fiction were little more than window dressing to the character and their actions. “Gemma Barrows” was a baseball story, my send up to W. P. Kinsella. “Big Al Shepard Plays Baseball on the Moon” was an earlier attempt at this. “Flipping the Switch” was a literary story about the rapid passage of time, set in a science fiction background because I knew little else. “Take One for the Road” was a straight literary mystery wrapped in the cloak of science fiction (barely) and managed by the skin of its teeth to find its way into ANALOG. Barry’s thesis throughout much of his critical writing about the genre was that we are capable of literary quality stories (there are many, many examples of this) that just happen to take on the cloak of science fiction and that should not diminish work. As I wrote my stories I had my college creative writing professor, Stephen Minot, forever in my head, asking me, “Why do you waste your talent on that genre junk?” Barry knew why. He had the reasons down cold.

Barry’s knowledge of the genre was encyclopedic, but his knowledge of literature outside the genre seemed equally encyclopedic to me. He had the chops to make the comparisons. Re-reading Breakfast I wish, I desperately wish, he was still around so we could talk about the book, his ideas, his criticisms about the literature, as we did on a couple of occasions as we walked circles around the parking lot at Readercon. Barry was holding the genre to a higher standard and I think he improved the quality of the literature of the genre as whole with that standard. It is a standard that will never be met. It is an impossibly high standard, but in its impossibility lies that germ that improves the quality of the work, helps if grow stronger and stronger with each passing year. As he would say, he tried. But the conditions were impossible.

Barry’s knowledge of the field led him to write some powerful pieces of criticism. His “Tripping with the Alchemist” is an absolutely stunning look at the field through he lens of a fee reader at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Each of his pieces on writers such as Alice Sheldon, Daniel Keyes, William Jenkins, and Isaac Asimov moved me to tears for different reasons. He reminded me of what great science fiction can be.

Normally, on our December sojourn to the warm climes of Florida, I take a break from my normal reading and spend a couple of weeks on “guilty pleasure” reading, pouring through Hollywood memoirs, especially older Hollywood. I’d had a list planned out for the trip this year: a re-read of Gary Giddins’ 2-volume biography of Bing Crosby, Quentin Taratino’s Cinema Speculations, Roger Ebert’s Great Movies collections. Barry changed my mind. He reinvigorated in my the sense of wonder from a different perspective, a literary perspective, and I decided to revisit works that I’d read early on when I swallowed them whole without the experience of equipment to properly digest them. So my vacation will be spent re-reading Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Double Star, Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, Silverberg’s Up the Line, Malzberg’s Galaxies; as well as some of the best short fiction of the genre through the volumes of Silverberg and Bova’s Science Fiction Hall of Fame. I come to these with a different mindset than the first time I approached them decades ago. I come to them now one who has, like Icarus, flown on wings of wax, too close to the sun, and who fell into the sea. But I didn’t drown. Barry’s book found me, on the anniversary of his passing, and from this lifeboat, he reached out his hand, pulled me to safety, and said, “Come on, kid, you can do better than that. I know you can.”

But the damage was done, and Silverberg took the brunt of it, the alien attacking every single one of my Silverberg books, including 3 copies Dying Inside, 2 leather-bound, one paperback, one signed. His memoir Other Spaces, Other Times was a victim. Time of the Great Freeze and Hawksbill Station and To Live Again and The Book of Skulls, which Silverberg recommended to me after I told how much I loved Dying Inside; The World Inside, and Up the Line, perhaps the greatest time travel story of all time, omitted from Barry Malzberg’s The Greatest Time Travel Stories of All Time for nothing more than its length; all of them victims, all of them caught in a mass homicide by a mindless alien bacteria. Clifford D. Simak was also found among the dead, City and a Masters of Science Fiction leather-bound edition of Way Station.

I’ve already started the search to replace the lost. A signed edition will be hard to come by. The last time I saw Silverberg was at the 2013 World Science Fiction convention in San Antonio, Texas. But I care less about the signature and more about the stories, and so I am working to replace the losses. The bookcase has already been replaced, the carpet cleaned, the alien purged. Now there is simply a 2-1/2 foot gap to fill, the only empty shelf space in my office, and it looms large at the corner of my vision late these days.

Writing here, as I’ve often said, is my favorite writing. Finding the time these days is a challenge, but the bigger challenge is finding what I want to say that I haven’t already said. I’ve repeated myself plenty in the millions of words I’ve put down here these last two decades. I’d like to repeat myself less in the future.

What to write about? Well, let’s start with what not to write about. This will undoubtably disappoint some readers, but I’m done with tech writing, paperless writing, Obsidian writing, how-to writing. Been there. Done that. That particular well has run dry. It was a rich well for a long time, and I know that a lot of readers first arrived here on the heels of a Going Paperless post.

So, what to write about? Two things come immediately to mind:

ONE. On January 1, 2026, the list of books I’ve reading since 1996 will be 30 years old. Thirty years! I was 24 when I started that list, on something of a whim while visiting my grandparents in New York. Little did I know the monster that list would produce. On that date there will be just about (if not exactly) 1,500 books on that list. Earlier this year, I started (and then stalled) on a new series, Shelf Life, which was a kind of autobiographical retrospectives of the books on my shelf. I wrote ten episodes and then stalled, but in this case, it was not for lack of desire, but lack of time, In 2026, I’d like to resume that series, and perhaps frame it initially as a retrospective look at the thirty best books I’ve read in 30 years¹.

TWO. In January 2011, I began my Vacation in the Golden Age, reading the old issues of Astounding Science Fiction and writing about the experience and what I read in each issue. I continued that series for the first 42 episodes / issues from July 1939 through November 1942. And then life caught up and I stopped. I’ve always wanted to finish. The magazines are there on my shelf, waiting to be read, I just need to oil my time machine and head back into the Golden Age².

There are other things I want to write about. Commentary, humor, observations. I would love to write something along the lines of E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat but I’m simply not that capable of a writer at this point³. But these two items, Shelf-Life and Vacation in the Golden Age are the ones whose gravity is strongest at the moment. So, if you are looking for some coming attractions for this blog in 2026, I’d keep my eyes open. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can.

1. Not including the ones I’ve already written about. ︎
2. And when I reach December 1950? What then? I’ve thought about that, and if I am not utterly burned out, I’d like to tackle the 3-year run of Unknown and follow that up with a similar series on Galaxy magazine from the 1950s. ︎
3. Then again, we’re talking about E. B. White, so the number of capable writers is relatively small in comparison. ︎

I have a tradition of reading Hollywood memoirs and Hollywood-adjacent books during this time of year, a guilty pleasure while I’m on vacation. And so I was looking for books that would fit the bill. I looked at my reading list and noted that I am currently reading my 1,489th¹ and 1,490th² books since January 1, 1996. At the same time, it occurred to me that January 1, 2026 would be a complete 30 years—three decades!—that I have kept track of the books I’ve read. I glanced at the calendar: December 11, 2025. I looked through past Decembers, glancing at what I read in the last two weeks and seeing that I easily managed to read five books during that period. A mission formed in my mind.

The mission, should I choose to accept it: finish the two books I am reading now and squeeze in 10 more books before the end of the year. Not 9 books. Not 11 books. Ten books. How could would it be to end my 30th year having read an even 1,500 books! I immediately accepted the mission and began putting together my list, which (though the order may change) comes roughly to:

1. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (our bookclub book for December)
2. Flight! By Chris Kraft
3. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins (a re-read)
4. Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years 1940-1946 by Gary Giddins (a re-read)
5. Cinema Speculations by Quentin Tarantino
6. The Great Movies by Roger Ebert
7. The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert
8. 100 Rules for Living to 100 by Dick Van Dyke³
9. Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson
10. The Narrow Bend Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss
11. Papyrus by Irene Vallejo
    

If I pull this off, I’ll finish Vallejo’s book while driving from the west coast of Florida to the east coast of the state on December 31, completing 1,500 books in 30 years, which I think is a pretty cool coincidence.

Can I do it? I guess we’ll find out. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, in January you can expect my usual Best Reads of 2025 post (when 2025 is actually over). In addition, I am planning a Best Read of the Last 30 Years as well. Stay-tuned.

1. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins ︎
2. Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg ︎
3. Dick Van Dyke Day, his 100th birthday, is this Saturday, December 13. ︎