I bought a new book!

That’s right. For the first time in 537 days I purchased a new book. It was just as exciting as I remember it being! The thrill of clicking that button, the ding of my email with the confirmation, the book waiting for me when I open my iPad. Oh, man. I’ve missed this.

All joking aside, let’s dig in to the “why” behind me buying this book. When I set out to accomplish this Herculean task, I knew that I had to put some order in place about how I attacked things. I wanted to work through standalone novels first, or even books where I owned an entire trilogy. And I’ve done that. In fact, I’m almost done with that portion of The List.

I knew that following that would be books where I owned the first book in a series and might wind up buying more after I read that first one. This is mainly caused by my need to read a series in succession for fear of having to go back through the previous novels to refresh my memory. Makes total sense, right? Right.

As I was finishing up my last two books in the Rivers of London series I happened to notice that book nine was coming out soon. Like in a few weeks soon. So I had a discussion with Laura about whether it was the right time to buy a book or not. We looked at my numbers – when the book was due to come out I would have read 54 out of the 171 books on my list. That’s over 30%!

We both agreed that it was the right thing to do – this would allow me to stay current on that series without having to go back and refresh my memory about the prior books. Of course, this means that I’ll have to make another page with a different list, and track another set of numbers, but that’s okay. I’m still reading, which is what matters.

So my next book will by Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch!