Every New Year's Day, I vow to keep a record of every book I read over the next 12 months. I have a special notebook for this, a large journal with blue leather covers, and that is all I've ever used it for.
I've had the journal for 15 years, and you might be surprised to learn that most of the pages are blank.
In January I dutifully start a list, but my resolve disintegrates almost immediately, and the list tapers off, sometimes by late January, always by March.
Some years I don't even start it.
I am not entirely sure why this is. Except for 2006 and 2007, the years I joined my nephew's Competitive Reading Club, I have never been able to sustain a yearly record. You need to understand that my family can turn anything into a competition — cracker smooshing (too hard to explain), fudge making, NFL game picking — so why not reading?
The rules of the Competitive Reading Club were simple. Read a book. Write down the title and the author. Give it a star rating and a review of no more than five words. (Good training for this job.) My review of Frank Delaney's 2007 novel "Tipperary," for instance, was this: "Forrest Gump in Ireland." One word to spare.
According to the club rules, the value of a book was weighted by length, so a book of up to 499 pages was worth one point, between 500 and 750 pages was worth two, and up to 1,000 was worth three. More than a thousand pages? What, are we crazy?
I won easily in 2006, with 78 points, and earned a $70 gift card. The next year, though, my total dropped to 74, and I came in second. And then I got this job, and while my numbers almost certainly rose — maybe even doubled — I quit the club and my record-keeping fell apart.