In 2019, I read 27 books. In 2020, I decided to challenge myself and read at least 50 books; which I managed to do, in fact reading as many as 63. But one thing I noticed was a perverse desire to read short books, since short books would get me to my goal faster. To counteract that, I changed my goals for 2021. Here’s what I wrote:

I’m going to set myself a bunch of more or less clearly defined goals. I don’t need to meet all of them. But it would be nice to meet some of them. And at the end of the year, I’d like to have a reading list I can be proud of.

I ended up reading 54 books, and it’s certainly a list I’m proud of. Full details below. But first, let’s look at the goals I set myself.

• Read at least 20 books written or edited by women. Reached! I read 20 books written by women, and one more edited by a woman. This was a rewarding goal to pursue since it made me pick up some interesting books that I might not otherwise have read. (Particularly thinking about the Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch here.) There were also friends who intentionally have me books by female authors for my birthday.
• Read more German. I read only two German books (by Wittgenstein). On the other hand, and more than making up for that, I read four books in French. I’m on a serious trajectory of improving my French at the moment, and that’s something I want to continue doing next year.
• Read a good number of books by or about Kant. Not that many: O’Shea, Gardner, and the Critique of Pure Reason itself. On the other hand, I did teach my Kant course and publish those 60+ ant videos, so I certainly reached some Kant-related goals.
• Finally read John Crowley’s Aegypt quartet. Reached! Brilliant, absolutely worth reading, and I’m glad that after all those years I finally got to the end.
• Read some massive books. I read some massive books. Perhaps the Crowley quartet counts. Certainly the Critique, the Bolland biography, and most of all Conant’s The Logical Alien. But this is something I want to pursue with perhaps even more vigour next year.
• Read all the books my wife gives me for Christmas. Reached! My wife gave me Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, Adrian Moore’s book on the infinite, Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere and Edith Brugmans’ Moreel scepticisme. And I read all of them.
• Read and/or return the books I’ve borrowed. Let’s not talk about this goal, shall we? It’s too morally painful.
• Read some books from the list made by David Bentley Hart. I read Sei Shōnagon, Lady Murasaki and As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams. Not a massive amount, but still: reached.

For next year, I’m going to be even more relaxed, in part because the last two years suggest to me that reading lots of books has become part of my normal routine again, and so I can afford to be more relaxed about it. The two things I want are these: (1) read more French books; (2) read more massive books. I’m probably not going to combine those goals by reading massive French books… that sounds like a bridge too far at the moment! And so now, finally, the list:

1. John Crowley, The Solitudes
2. William Shakespeare, Macbeth
3. Edith Brugmans, Moreel scepticisme
4. John Crowley, Love & Sleep
5. Takasue’s daughter, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams
6. John Crowley, Dæmonomania
7. Murasaki Shikibu, The Diary of Lady Murasaki
8. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
9. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius
10. John Crowley, Endless Things
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
12. James R. O’Shea (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide
13. Anoniem, Karel ende Elegast
14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
15. Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason
16. M. Vasalis, De oude kustlijn
17. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam
18. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
19. Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
20. Willem Otterspeer, Bolland: een biografie
21. Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body?
22. Bas Heijne, Leugen & waarheid
23. Ali Smith, Autumn
24. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds
25. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment
26. Ali Smith, Winter
27. Bas Heijne, Angst en schoonheid
28. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
29. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology
30. Georges Simenon, Het gebeier van Bicêtre
31. Georges Simenon, La pipe de Maigret
32. Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
33. Georges Simenon, De danseres van Le Gai-Moulin
34. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
35. Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion
36. Gerrit van de Linde, De gedichten van den schoolmeester
37. Lorraine Daston, Tegen de natuur in
38. Seneca, Medea & Phaedra & Trojaanse vrouwen
39. Herman de Dijn, Hoe overleven we de vrijheid?
40. Jennifer Morton, Moving Up without Losing you Way
41. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire
42. Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace
43. Sempé-Goscinny, Le petit Nicolas
44. Eugéne Ionesco, La cantatrice chauve & Exercises de conversation […]
45. Spinoza, Korte verhandeling over God, de mens en zijn geluk
46. Ellis Peters, Un bénédictin pas ordinaire
47. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere
48. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
49. Iris Murdoch, Sartre
50. Philipa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
51. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit
52. Sofia Miguens / James Conant, The Logical Alien
53. A. W. Moore, The Infinite (3rd edition)
54. Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind