Reading records
I have been an avid reader most of my life. My parents always tell people that they have very few pictures of me growing up, since I always had "my nose in a book." Some evidence of that from a Christmas in the 1950's.
A Reading Diary
I have kept a journal of all the books I have read since 1959. It started out in one of those 5x7 Record books (with the black pebble grain cover and red binding) which I eventually filled and then started using a larger blank book with a dark blue cover punctuated by little pictures of flower arrangements. I've used that one since 1984 and it still has room for at least a couple more years.
At first I wrote down everything including magazine articles and individual short stories. That didn't last very long and I settled on just recording books of 100 or more pages. I included the date, author, title, number of pages and a subjective "category" The last included things like novel, biography, short stories, science fiction, etc. with many entries having both a major and minor category: e.g. Novel/Mystery.
Somewhere in the 1990's I started to computerize my reading diary. I entered my data as a "flat file" with 6 lines per book:
- Author's first name
- Author's last name
- Title
- Date finished reading
- Number of pages
- Category
When I started the data entry I had over 1500 books in my diary, so it was a labor intensive task. After I got a fair chunk of data in text file form, I started to create a database and programs to manipulate it. This was done in a proprietary database system called FAME. I had been one of the original developers of FAME and had been using it since 1982. It was convenient since I had access to the software and I didn't have access to any SQL-based DBMS systems.
Eventually I discovered the Python Programming Language and decided to transfer my reading diary to use Python. I have implemented a mini query language for extracting information from this database. It is written in Python and runs on my Mac OS X system at home. I am in the process of regenerating and reorganizing many of the html pages I have generated using the language. Most are examples of useless information of interest mainly to myself, and put here mainly to keep me off the streets at night.
The top 100 list is a commentary I made for my son a few years ago. It stops at number 99, but there are more than 100 books mentioned, since several of the entries describe series. It was written when my diary total of books read was about 1,960. As of June 14, 2007 the bottom line is 2,587 books finished, and counting. So maybe it's time to write a revised edition.