Reading List - 50 Years

According to my GoodReads book list I have read 1,458 books since 1970. I've been carefully tracking my reading since 1970 during my service in the Navy. I kept a notebook and among other things I wrote down each book I read with a date. My first entry was The Time Machine by H. G. Wells in January 1970.

I wrote down my reading throughout my time in the Navy and then continued through the seventies while in college. I generally did not add books I was reading for class unless it was something I would have read anyway. No textbooks but good nonfiction. I always looked forward to the time between semesters to read a good novel.

I had several notebooks dedicated to my reading list and some time in the late eighties I started putting my books list in a word processor on my computer. I then kept a very long list on my computer with a backup disc stored away. I kept that up for another twenty years or so until the GoodReads website and app came along. I started using that in 2012. I converted all my word document lists into a format to upload into GoodReads. At that time there were around 900 books in the list.

A few years ago I spent some time and created book shelves for various categories of books. I had originally just had fiction and nonfiction shelves. I gradually added more and there are some books that overlap.

I find it interesting to go back and look at books I've read over the years and to especially look at them by topic category. I was recently asked to recommend some music biographies to select a gift. It turns out I had 79 books in my music category and more than half were biographies or memoirs so it was easy to quickly recommend several of them.

Here are my categories.

• Fiction
• Nonfiction
• Crime/Mystery
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy
• Biography/Memoir
• History
• Historical Fiction
• Civil War
• Horror
• Humor
• Dystopian
• Economics
• Politics
• Science
• Maps
• Art
• Library Related
• Black Lives Matter