ebooks

My own book club (2025 and 10 years wrap-up)

it’s that time of the year again, when I look back and see how many books have kept me more or less sane throughout the year.

Here’s the stats and the list, and since 2025 marked my 10 years’ experience with e-reading, I am also posting some widers stats, because basically I am that nerdy. 🙂

From 2015 to 2025 I have read 309 books (they would definitely fill a library shelf), for a total of 97629 pages. Here’s a couple of graphs for the visual people. Although I did read a good number of books in 2016, if you look at pages read, my most prolific years were the last 3, with more than a thousand pages per month read.

And here’s the full 2025 list:

  • Orbital,Samantha Harvey ,138
  • The Marriage Portrait,Maggie O’Farrell,448
  • Hamnet,Maggie O’Farrell,321
  • This Must Be the Place,Maggie O’Farrell,401
  • The Distance Between Us,Maggie O’Farrell,354
  • Our Evenings,Alan Hollinghurst,494
  • Heft ,Liz Moore ,353
  • The Unseen World,Liz Moore ,418
  • Noi due siamo uno,Matteo Spicuglia,185
  • The Edible Woman,Margaret Atwood ,353
  • The Road,Cormac McCarthy ,324
  • The Women,Kristin Hannah ,476
  • Blue Sisters,Coco Mellors,514
  • The Woman Who Lost Her Soul,Bob Shacochis ,738
  • My Friends,Hisham Matar ,461
  • Silent Spring ,Rachel Carson,155
  • We Do Not Part,Han Kang ,371
  • The City and Its Uncertain Walls,Haruki Murakami ,445
  • Elizabeth: A Novel of the Unnatural ,Ken Greenhall,146
  • The Safekeep,Yael van der Wouden ,262
  • Careless People: The explosive memoir that Meta doesn’t want you to read,Sarah Wynn-Williams ,390
  • Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination ,Karen Hao,479
  • Consider Yourself Kissed,Jessica Stanley ,337
  • Ubik,Philip K. Dick ,241
  • Confessions Of A Crap Artist,Philip K. Dick ,258
  • The Berry Pickers,Amanda Peters,295
  • Il quaderno di Maya, Isabel Allende ,403
  • The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom ,240
  • This Is How,M.J. Hyland ,384
  • Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in L:etter ,Mark Dunn,204
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ,Betty Smith ,622
  • The Names,Florence Knapp ,330
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day,David Sedaris,300
  • Less Than Zero,Bret Easton Ellis,204
  • La mattina dopo,Mario Calabresi ,107
  • Flesh,David Szalay ,334

My own book club (2024)

If you want to know what I’ve been reading this year and some of the relevant stats, here’s the full disclosure:

  • The Fraud zadie smith 446
  • Red Pill (202 GRAND) Hari Kunzru  301
  • One Moment in Time Shari Low 290
  • The Burnout Sophie Kinsella  387
  • We’ll Prescribe You a Cat Syou Ishida  238
  • Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life William Finnegan 466
  • The Bed Moved: Stories  Rebecca Schiff 146
  • The Bee Sting Paul Murray 638
  • Evenings and Weekends Oisín McKenna 353
  • The Travelling Cat Chronicles Hiro Arikawa 238
  • What You Are Looking for is in the Library Michiko Aoyama  247
  • Extras (The Uglies Book 4)  Scott Westerfeld  408
  • Specials (The Uglies Book 3)  Scott Westerfeld  374
  • Pretties (The Uglies Book 2) Scott Westerfeld  361
  • Uglies (The Uglies Book 1)  Scott Westerfeld  448
  • Butter Asako Yuzuki  448
  • Murder on Lake Garda Tom Hindle  358
  • Stray Stephanie Danler  249
  • Sweetbitter Stephanie Danler  353
  • Spoonbenders Daryl Gregory  498
  • An Available Man Hilma Wolitzer  305
  • How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems Randall Munroe  321
  • The Wild Silence Raynor Winn  280
  • The Salt Path Raynor Winn  273
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy 430
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin  383
  • Player One  Douglas Coupland  258
  • Microserfs Douglas Coupland  386
  • Heaven Mieko Kawakami 181
  • All The Lovers In The Night Mieko Kawakami 222
  • Generation A Douglas Coupland  322
  • Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Douglas Coupland  196
  • Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress: How Innovators of the Roaring 20s Created the Consumer Revolution  Jason Voiovich 477
  • Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker Kevin Mitnick 433
  • Mythos: Greek Myths Retold Stephen Fry 415
  • Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd. Jonas Jonasson 367
  • The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared  Jonas Jonasson 402
  • Recursion Blake Crouch  324
  • Master of the Revels: A Return to Neal Stephenson’s D.O.D.O.  Nicole Galland  552
  • Artemis Andy Weir  320
  • Randomize  Andy Weir  32
  • Project Hail Mary Andy Weir  482

In 2024, I read 42 books, a total of 14608, 1217.33 pages per month.

The rise of the digital bookworm

I have always been an avid reader since the time my mom, for my 11th birthday, gave me a library card for a present. It was one of the best presents of my life.

In my youth I used to plan my holidays according to how many books I needed in my bags, and there was often a whole heavy piece of luggage dedicated to those papery things.

Fast forward to this summer, where I have totally embraced my e-reader and its entire philosophy.

Yes there is no “paper feeling”, and the old fashioned cover judgement is not really a viable option, but I was able to read almost incessantly for my entire holiday, thanks to the kids being a bit more manageable on the beach, and the fact that I could hop onto any public WiFi and buy the next book in no time.

How is that for a digital transformation? 🙂

Also, because I read books in English (it’s not my first language and it helps keeping up), in the past finding good paperback best sellers in English was something complicated in faraway seaside desolate lands, so it had to be solely planned in advance. If I finished my stack earlier I had to revert to Italian books from the local store, sometimes not even my genre.

In my rich three weeks’ vacation (the most I had in 10 years) I was able to devour a total of 12 books, which is more than I was ever able to accomplish even in my own mother tongue, even in the university days.

What is the point I’m trying to make? That this is exactly the core of a digital transformation: when the experience gets so immensely better than the non-digital (analogue? I still have that thing) that it reaches a point of no return, and you are transformed not only as an actor but also as the end-user of what this transformation is all about.

Embrace your e-readers because they don’t mean paper books are dead. I still have a full library in my house, and although I am buying most e-books nowadays, sometimes I add to this library some piece that I want to leave for my kids to read, or books that brought an important message or meaning to me, or just super-silly books that I find entertaining or with a precious cover that I want to touch and admire.

But the convenience of reading 12 books in my holiday is something worth every inch of this digital transformation.

ebook-clip-art

 

Out of curiosity, these are the 12 books:

  • Into thin air – Jon Krakauer
  • The Promise – Freda Lightfoot
  • Where’d you go, Bernadette – Maria Semple
  • About Grace – Anthony Doerr
  • The Uncoupling – Meg Wolitzer
  • The heart goes last – Margaret Atwood
  • All the light we cannot see – Anthony Doerr
  • The Vegetarian – Han Kang
  • The Other Child – Lucy Atkins
  • Sparrow – L.J.Shen
  • The danish girl -David Ebershoff
  • Transition – Iain M. banks