In late 2015, it occurred to me that I had hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves, due to my decades-long habit of buying books but not reading them. So I decided to do something about that.

From early 2016 through late 2019, I read or skimmed (or glanced at and decided to discard without reading) my few hundred unread mass-market paperbacks.

Then I started in on my 570 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and I created a spreadsheet to track the number of those books that I had read, and the number remaining, and to estimate how long it would take to finish.

As of this writing, in August, 2023, I have less than 200 of those left to go; I’m expecting to finish in late 2025. And as I’m cleaning up my website, it occurred to me that it might be nice to add a page showing my progress on this project.

(I’ve added about 44 more books since I started this phase of the project; so one way to think about the numbers is to pretend that I started with 614 instead of 570.)

So here’s the graph that Google Sheets generates from my data.

After I finish this phase of the project, the next phase will be reading my unread ebooks. There are a few hundred of those, and I’m averaging getting through about a hundred unread books a year, so I imagine that’ll take me another few years.