Trying to find things in the depths of my website is an interesting experience. I remember that one of the first personal websites I ever visited (it was 1994) used the classic “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” line from the original unix adventure game to describe their site which I thought was a fun way to describe the web then, but it’s definitely true now that I have decades of rotten links, half remembered posts and detritus of numerous software changes scattered about. Trying to find the right twisty passage is challenging even from the backend. What I was looking for in my maze this time were the book roundup posts that I used to make each year.

• cataloging books covers 2000 to 2003
• yearly book update is 2004
• yearly book roundup is 2005
• reading roundup is 2006

I don’t think I’ve made one since. I didn’t mention in the cataloging books post that I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 inputting my bookshelves into my Palm V pda but I’m willing to own up to this these days. Also there were fireworks. Also I was quite happy. I gave certainly had a lot of much less memorable New Year’s Eves. My book database moved from my Palm to this website, and then, probably around the time I stopped posting the roundups here I moved everything to Goodreads, but kept the reviews syncing back to this website. I’m very glad I did that. Goodreads is a good community but I haven’t been happy with the Amazon connection for a while now and last year decided to jump to Storygraph, an independent site which had some features that I liked. Actually the feature that made me jump was Beeminder’s integration with Storygraph where I can set a goal for how many pages I want to read and easily track it, something that was much harder to do from Goodreads. I’m still keeping this website up to date as my primary place where I write about the books I’ve read but Storygraph has some nice data and just sent me my 2022 yearly roundup which I’ve enjoyed perusing. I read 45 books, always less than I intend, I think I read a book a week but that rarely seems to quite happen. I gave six of them five stars out of five. I’ve put them in the image at the top of this post but for the record they are

• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
• Free Love by Tessa Hadley
• Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon
• The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee
• The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Interesting that there are only two mysteries in the six, I used to read little else. Now it’s not even come up as my top genre. I find it interesting that Storygraph shows you what the most and least popular of your reads are with other users of the site. My most popular book was Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and least popular was Jasper Wynn’s Water Ways. I gave them both four stars but I enjoyed the Wynn more than the Rooney. They also give me these two graphs, one is a mood map month by month, and the other of how much I read. I’d like a way to see the correlation between them. It looks a lot like I read more when I read lighter books, and that makes a lot of sense. Best go and read some books for 2023 I guess!