Good Books for a Lousy Year

If you consider listening to an audiobook to be reading a book (I do), you can likely fit in a lot more listening time without changing too much. I've replaced most music listening with audiobook / podcast / text-to-speech article listening. And I pretty much always have bud-type earphones around my neck so I can plug them in when I go to do some 5 minute chore. I'm not necessarily getting through 70 books a year, but I suspect I'm in the top one percent or so for magazine article consumption.

This does mean you're not, say, having a lot of quiet time for your thoughts. I don't necessarily miss this, but I'm sure others will.

I’ve read 121 books this year, and I read 129 last year. I’ll probably meet or exceed that number this year.

Generally I’m reading at least two books at a time, one non-fiction and one fiction. I tend to listen to the non-fiction books and read the ebook/physical fiction book.

I wake up in the morning, make coffee/breakfast for me and my wife, and read the ebook/physical book while I’m eating. I read whenever I’m in the car (audiobook non-fiction) and when I’m doing simple chores around the house or at work. I recently started reading the audiobooks during my exercise time, so that adds at least an hour a day. If I’m eating alone for lunch I’ll read the ebook/physical book. On days off I’ll read the ebook/physical book as a form of relaxation for a few hours as well. Finally, I read the ebook/physical book every night as I fall asleep. I generally have to go back a page or two the next morning as I might have missed a few paragraphs as I drift off.

I generally boost the speed of the audiobook to as fast as I can deal with (depends on the narration), but I can’t do that with any voices I’m familiar with. I read Obama’s audiobook recently and I kept that at 1X speed.

I’ve been reading the audiobooks for ~3 years, and before that I averaged around 60 or 70 books a year with a range of 50 on the low end to 82 on the high end.

Last year I took notes on all the non-fiction ebook/physical books I read. I haven’t done the same this year and I feel like I’m not missing out on anything, although the notes were useful when trying to find a reference quickly.

I sleep at least 8 hours a night, and I don’t feel rushed in my reading or anything like that. I think what allows me to read so many books is that I have been reading like this since I was a teenager (~20 years) so I read and comprehend quite quickly. The high-speed audiobooks also almost double the number of books and I don’t see a huge drop off in knowledge/usefulness/entertainment. I also don’t really watch TV so this is my main form of entertainment, along with movies a few times a week.

For sure. For worldwide literature translated to English you could do a lot worse that the Complete review[1] its father site the Literary Saloon is quite good too[2]

If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3]

In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4]

I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive.

Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6]

To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever:

1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati

2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo.

3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman

4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar

5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa

6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata.

7. Midaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz

[1]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [2]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [3]https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ [4]https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html [5]https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themod... [6]https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literat...

We will look back at 2020 and we'll think it was not such a lousy year. I personally consider that Covid19 was a godsend. Everyone (including Gates) were saying that a pandemic is not a matter of if but rather of when. And one came. But remember, we have a flu pandemic every single year. For a pandemic to be registered as serious, it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much. It was quite the minimum extra-lethality needed to shake people into action. And we did act. We saw how bad we are at preparedness (I mean, if the famous "stockpile" doesn't have N95s, then what does it have?). It exposed so many holes. But then Pfizer and Moderna pulled the miracle. What they have done is not just come up with the vaccine for Covid, but they have broken the 4-minute mile of vaccines. Shattered it. Like going from 4:05 to 0:35. When the next one will come (and come it will), a 10-month sequencing-to-EUA cycle will be the target to beat. Not a 5-year timeline. Will we be able to have a vaccine in 6 months, or maybe 3 months? That's not entirely inconceivable now.

So, sure we've paid a dear price in blood with this Covid19, but it could have been much, much, much worse. And when the truly bad one will come, we'll be so much more prepared.

I’ve lost multiple acquaintances, and my significant other works at a hospital that has been slammed with COVID patients for over 6 months, and she is so burnt out and so tired everyday, and there’s nothing I can do to help her. Your assertion that this is a godsend rings very hollow to me.

Of course we have and will continue to learn from this, but that doesn’t mean this is a good thing.