Keeping track of the books you read + secret treasures + Brutalism

May I recommend

Keeping track of the books you read.

I started doing this a few years ago when my reading of actual books slowed (to be fair, the Internet had been invented and I had a lot of videos of ladies in athleisure wear making salads to watch). To get myself back in the game, I gave myself a challenge of reading 45 books in a year. I jotted them down when I’d finished and by December, I’d hit my target. Yay!

The next year I raised the challenge to fifty books and started giving them a star rating to remind myself if I liked them or not. This is where things got a little dicey — I realized that sometimes I was racing through books or finishing them when I didn’t want to, simply so I could “count” them in my listing. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to gamify reading, which has been one of my life’s great pleasures.

So the next year, I recalibrated and now I keep track of the books I’m reading, but I don’t count them and I’m not trying to hit a target. I like having the list and…