Reading progress — 24dec25

We’re almost at the end of the observed numbered year, so I thought I’d do one of my little updates and clear off my plate on the matter.

I’ve slipped a bit on consumption since the last update and I think I’ve added a book or two to my completion rate, but I have been adding pages not reflected in the page-count on Goodreads due to unfinished books not appearing in my stats.

If you add the progress I’ve made in my current audiobook (yes, audiobooks count as reading), the two books I am currently reading and the books that I’ve abandoned — totaling approximately another 1000 pages in addition to that number in my official Goodreads stats — I have read approximately 9800 pages since I started tracking my reads in October. Completed books sits at 22, with a high likelihood of adding one or two more this week.

Lessons learned with respect to abandoned reads…

If I hesitant to read a book, I should listen to my gut

I have started reading a number of books these past few months that I thought were likely either niche reads or potentially overrated based on recommendations from people or sites or algorithm. I can see why they were recommended, but some of them were most definitely not something I would choose to read if I knew what to expect between the covers and I hated more than a few right off the bat. I struggled to finish a few and reserve judgment until the end, but my gut had warned me that the book was not my speed before I even started.

One of them, a book that ended up being New Age baloney about shamanism, comes highly recommended by several people. But when the author, who holds credentials, starts right off talking about “the New Age” (yes, capitalized) and making gross generalizations about indigenous cultural traditions before immediately appropriating those traditions… It becomes a garbage read. Much of what he said in the opening chapter was such garbage untethered to reality as to make me wonder why he is respected as an author at all. I think he was more interested in becoming a guru than in being a scholar.

In another case, while the idea of a contemporary magical village must try to hide its nature from the rest of the world might appeal to some folks, it felt like a pond-shallow read after the first few chapters (not to mention highly derivative of the graphic novel series, Fables). That got binned as well.

Not saying that maybe I was just in a mood those days, but in most cases, I started reading each even though they seemed like a chore from the get-go. I shouldn’t have wasted my time and I should have skipped those books giving me bad vibes.

Warning: blasphemy ahead

When I was younger, certain authors could do no wrong and some of that carried into recent years. It’s why I continued to read a series up until last night even though I didn’t really enjoy it and was pretty sure I could guess what is going to happen the last 40% in second book of three.

You see, that’s the problem when you’re a prolific writer… pretty soon you start to recycle your themes and ideas, making you a predictable writer. Which is boring and feels like a money-grab, honestly.

Enter Stephen King.

I have certainly not read everything he has to offer. My absolute adoration for Stephen King waned around It. I enjoyed the hell out of that book back then, and on recent reread, but shortly afterward I started hit-or-missing his books (with the exception of the seven-book The Dark Tower series). Nothing really caught my imagination after It, and that’s fine. We don’t have to like everything an author writes to be a fan.

I took advantage of a free Kindle Unlimited account and saw that his Mr. Mercedes was available to “check out”. While I ended up enjoying his non-horror hard-boiled detective noir of the modern era, there were more than a few moments that I questioned his decisions and found some topics within repugnant without really contributing to the story he was attempting to tell. Unnecessary details that were there more for squick factor than for storytelling, including King’s obsession with pickaninny-jive speech amongst his black characters across all of his novels — having grow up in a predominantly black neighborhood, it always reads/sounds like a white person inauthentically trying to sound black (even when done for comedy). He also has an obsession with characters who masturbate or have weird sexual fixations, something that probably lost it’s OMG factor by the late 1980s.

As I said, in the end, I liked the tension build up and action for Mr. Mercedes. But not so much that I wasn’t hesitant to continue the series with Finders Keepers.

I should have listened to my gut. I made it 60% of the way through and, while the story is okay, it is mostly forgettable and 100% predictable. I know how things will play out by the end, although the details are sketchy. The book feels very throw-away and I’ve come to the conclusion that Stephen King is no longer the writing god I took him for.

To be honest, those cracks have been showing up for a couple of years now, but these two books cemented my conviction that his best writing is behind him. I don’t even want to read anything more by him anytime soon, as I have had my fill after this foray into titles I missed, and I don’t see anything promising in the rest of his later works.

I think those are the two biggest lessons I’ve learned these past few months.

1. If the vibes are not there, the vibes are not there. Don’t bother reading something when they are not there just because you think you ought to.
2. Even literature’s/fiction’s greats have bad days and eras. And sometimes they never get their groove back. Just because you’ve enjoyed an author in the past does not mean that they are still a good fit for your reading preferences in recent times and they don’t give two shits anyway if you don’t read them because someone else will. See lesson 1.

Additional thoughts

I’m still working my way through several books on the side: Trouble Boys (The story of the band The Replacements) and Best Served Cold (audiobook).

My primary read is now to work my way through The Expanse series, as I see it is also part of Kindle Unlimited, and I may mix it up with Esslemont’s Path to Ascendency series that starts with Dancer’s Lament (also Kindle Unlimited). Once I finish up with Trouble Boys, I intend to read Todd Snider’s I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales — had I known this existed, I would have read it before his untimely death this autumn. And, of course, if it ever shows up from library transfer, I intend to read The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in A World of Joiners by Kaminski to keep my commitment to do so to lodestarwytch.

Others on the horizon? Laudy, there is plenty, including some graphic novels, some eye candy revisits, books I haven’t even realized exist yet (not to mention those picked up on holiday sale via Kindle). I’ve got to-reads pouring out of my ears at this point, so much so that I’ve banned myself from looking for cheap books on sale. The pile is HUUUUGE.

I’m looking to break 20k pages as a goal for 2026 (I prefer page counts over books for metrics because of the variability in length of books). That’s double what I did in 3 months, so it is a reasonable goal for 12 months. That amounts to around 50 books, give or take, for those who prefer that metric instead. Absolutely doable.

I plan to start a fresh page for tracking in 2026. If you want to check out what I have been reading over the past few months, either visit the local page or Goodreads.

Do you have reading goals for 2026? Are there any books you think I should drop my current reads right now to read? Anything you read that blows your mind six ways to Sunday that you think might be up my alley? I’m always interested in ideas, keeping in mind I sometimes base what I want to read on whim alone.