Three Years of Pandemic Reading
I’ve been tracking my reading on Goodreads since around 2016. When I exported the data recently, the pandemic years jumped off the page.
The Numbers
Blue bars = pandemic years (2020–2022). Data from Goodreads export.
| Year | Books | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 25 | |
| 2017 | 37 | |
| 2018 | 44 | |
| 2019 | 49 | |
| 2020 | 90 | +84% YoY |
| 2021 | 99 | peak |
| 2022 | 88 | |
| 2023 | 17 | first kid |
| 2024 | 38 | second kid |
| 2025 | 35 |
277 books in three years. The 2023 cliff is its own data point — our first child arrived and reading time collapsed overnight. We had our second kid in 2024 (19 months later!). It’s recovered somewhat but will probably never hit pandemic levels again, which is fine.
The pandemic reading wasn’t intentional. I wasn’t executing a reading plan. I just had more unstructured time, less commuting, fewer social obligations, and apparently a lot of anxiety to metabolize through books.
What I Was Reading
The 2020 list was heavily shaped by that summer — a lot of American history, race, and justice. Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Ralph Ellison, Jill Lepore. I read Invisible Man for the first time!
2021 shifted toward philosophy and intellectual history. Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was a revelation — I’d been meaning to read it for years and it delivered completely. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live (on Montaigne) is one of the best books I’ve read about how to read. I really enjoyed her other book At the Existentialist Café. S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment was my favorite book of the year — I had no idea how much I didn’t know about Central Asia’s golden age of scholarship from the 9th to 13th centuries.
2022 got eclectic. I read Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) cover to cover, which I’d been meaning to do since I taught myself how to code in 2013. I remember studying it one day in particular at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA. My girlfriend was attending a fountain pen meetup and I recall cracking it open and trying to code up some sorting algorithms in Python. In 2022, I read a lot of romance novels, which I got into thanks to my wife. It all began with a trip to the famous Culver City Bookstore, The Ripped Bodice. I got some initial recommendations and my curiousity led me after that. I read The Gates of Europe right as Russia invaded Ukraine, which gave the news a different texture. And I read Four Thousand Weeks, which is the only time-management book I’ve ever found genuinely useful — its argument is essentially that you will never finish your to-do list and you should make peace with that.
Recommendations
If I had to pick one book from each year:
2020 — Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I don’t know why it took me this long. One of the great American novels.
2021 — Lost Enlightenment by S. Frederick Starr. Centuries of polymaths — mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, philosophers — from Central Asia, most of whom I’d never heard of. Al-Biruni alone is worth the price of admission.
2022 — Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The premise: you have roughly 4,000 weeks of life. You will not get through your to-do list. Stop trying to optimize your way to a cleared inbox and start choosing what to neglect deliberately.
Honorable mentions: Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), How to Live (Bakewell), The Story of Philosophy (Durant), Why We Sleep (Walker — I read it and still don’t sleep enough), A History of Western Philosophy (Russell, who is extremely funny about other philosophers).
The To-Read List
730 books. It grows faster than I read. I’ve made peace with this too.
My Goodreads profile is here if you want to see the full list or compare shelves. I also built a reading dashboard with the full stats.