#95books

The objective: read 95 books a year, tweet them as you go. I’m not reading-competitive, but I like the social aspect of sharing my books, and I like the ritual of writing a tweet when I finish a book. Gods know Twitter can use all the non-vitriol it can get. Here’s what Jonathan Ball (presumed originator of the #95books hashtag, with Ryan Fitzpatrick), says about how it started:

On Dec. 26, 2008, Karl Rove published an article titled “Bush is a Book Lover” in The Wall Street Journal. Furious on a good day, I read this and became enraged — at myself. I was sure Bush was out-reading me. What was my excuse? I wasn’t as busy as the president. I was a writer completing a PhD in literature! As 2009 began, I enlisted my friend Ryan Fitzpatrick in a resolve to read 95 books that year. Like Rove and Bush, we’d make it a competition (that’s where we ended the Rove and Bush emulation, I promise … ). The winner would buy the loser sushi. Shockingly, I read 119 books that year. Ryan read 110. We continued the competition every year.

Here are my books for 2018, so far. Below that are previous years:

[do_widget id=custom_html-3]