For years, I’ve just used the Kindle app to read on my Android or iPhone. It was easy, and send to Kindle is awesome. The UI, while cluttered with Amazon nonsense, was pleasing enough to get along with. But I now host all of my own eBooks, and I am trying to divorce myself from Amazon as much as I can. The issue I’ve had is that there are no great eBook readers for Android.

So, I used to read a lot more. The last two years I’ve slowed down some, mostly because of some truly epic reading slumps. I’m kind of back on track right now, but I still have days where I just don’t want to read a book. Sometimes I want to read some fanfiction or just watch a movie.

This got me thinking about the pressure I feel to read every day and to read a lot every year. I wondered where that feeling comes from. And the answer is social media. I like to follow book YouTubers and Instagramers, because they give me ideas and it’s entertaining to watch other people’s reading journey. But they all read a hundred books a year or more, and often read 7 books a week if they push themselves. It’s not all of them, but if you get into BookTube, you’ll see the number of super readers on there far outpaces the normal paced readers.

Remember a few weeks ago, I wrote about how I had these plans to read a literal ton of books in October? I had been coming off my worse reading slump in ages, and dammit, I planned on finally getting some of the books off of my TBR list.

Yeah.

That didn’t happen. Now, to be fair, I did read some. Here’s the list I set out with:

• Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones
• Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
• Dynasty by Tom Holland
• Investigation, Mediation, Vindication by Chris Tullbane
• Genghis Khan by Jack Weatherford
• The Will of the Many by James Islington
• Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge
• A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic by J Penner

I finished the last one, and I’m much further in to Grave Peril. So I did read. But I didn’t really make as much progress as I had hoped to. Now, I knew when I wrote that post that I was never going to get through everything. I had hoped for more progress than I actually made, however.

One of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of adult fiction, is that authors tend to have their characters swear way too fucking much. Now, I’m not opposed to swearing. I think that it adds flavor and personality to dialogue that would be missing otherwise.

The problem is that it’s overused. Like with exclamation points, using the word “fuck” over and over again dilutes the message you’re trying to portray. Now, there is an exception to this. If the character is a potty mouth, then it’s fine. But having all of your characters swearing like sailors all the time? It just makes the words mean nothing.

Honestly, this title is a lie. This has been a horrible reading year. I’ve read 15 books, reread 3 books, and that’s it. That’s about half of what I usually do. I’m a little ahead of last year, which was also a down year. So, I guess that’s good?

It’s not as if I have to meet my goals of reading so many books, but it feels like I’ve been going for a long period of time between books. I finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King back in the end days of August, read a smutty harem book, and then nothing since then. Oh, I got about 90 pages read of the next Dresden Files book, but nothing significant. I just can’t seem to keep my interest on anything lately.

This was supposed to be a great year for reading. I planned on 40 new books and 40 rereads, which is slightly better than last year. But so far I’m at 12 books and we’re already half way through the year. It’s worse though, because I haven’t finished a book since mid-May. I’ve hopped from one to another, constantly picking up something new, and just cannot for the life of me get interested.