Introduction | Rules | 2025
I was an avid reader as a kid. Ever since the art of reading revealed itself to me when I was four, I've devoured books one after another, eager to learn new things about the world we live in or immerse myself in an entirely new fictional world. But as I grew up, I turned to books less and less, distracted by new life challenges and the rise of the Internet, that brought with itself new ways of consuming information.
Like many adults in similar situations, I lamented this decline. I am not of the opinion that books are the paramount format of media and that a person that never reads books is uneducated and dull. Visual arts, music, cinematography can enrich our lives just as much as books do. But it's a format that's been around for a while, and one I know for sure I've enjoyed in the past, so why not pick reading up again?
One goal I set for myself in the beginning of 2025 is to read 24 books - 12 fiction and 12 non-fiction. It's not a very challenging goal, given that I'm a fast reader once the initial hurdle of actually choosing and opening up a book is over, and that short stories each count as one point in the fiction counter. As of August 2025, I'm making good progress. The list is surprisingly diverse on every point - I've acquired an old second-hand e-reader to encourage myself to read more and doomscroll less, but I'm reading physical books, too - over the years I've amassed an embarassing pile of books and comics I've very enthusiastically requested as birthday gifts but never as much as opened. I've also acquired a new taste for audiobooks, often ripping them myself from thrift store CDs. I read in English as well as my native Russian, and dabble in other languages as well though at a much decreased speed. I read modern fiction and classic Russian authors everyone told me sound boring as hell as high school mandated reading but become suddenly very interesting as you reach 25 years of age (they were right on the money) and re-read some books I've enjoyed as a kid but mostly forgot.
I'm a bit conflicted as to how to organize this page. On one hand, I'd definitely like to include things like a short review of each book, a small snapshot of how I felt immediately after finishing each book. And it would be nice for archival purposes to include more information than just the title of the book: whether it was an e-book, a particular physical edition or an audiobook. If it's an audiobook, the name of the narrator. If it's a translation, the name of the translator since there can be different translations of one book. As someone who likes to collect and organize digital data, I really like this idea.
But as 1) a person with limited time and energy and 2) as someone who hates the modern trend of companies collecting as much personal data as they can, I don't want to build the next Goodreads or Amazon reviews. This is just a silly personal web page, and if the process of painstakingly logging each new book ever starts to feel too much of a chore or too corporate-like, I'm not gonna do it. Besides, I'd really like to keep the barebones Web 1.0 "aesthetic" (if you can even call it that), which will start to feel pretty cluttered if there's too much unnecessary information. So we'll see how this turns out.