Share of each year's books that are fiction.
Books per genre per year. Darker is more.
Books by decade of first publication.
With the household's books taken out, the shelf shows three readers in a row. From 2013 to 2017 it's a product manager's shelf: The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Kanban, Hooked, Competing Against Luck and The Manager's Path, next to a stack of paleo cookbooks and Mark Sisson.
In 2018 the library card changes everything. You read nearly four times as many books a year, and food becomes the thing you read about most. From 2018 to 2021 there are 65 books on cooking and food: Ottolenghi, Maangchi, Koshersoul, The Cooking Gene, a run of Instant Pot and sous vide books. It looks like how you learn to cook: borrow it, cook from it, give it back.
Since 2021, fiction has taken over. It's roughly 70% of what you read in 2024 and 2025, and most of it is big invented worlds: 23 Brandon Sanderson books (10 of them between January and March 2025), Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy in two formats, Jemisin, Egan, Stephenson, Tchaikovsky. Nearly every book on the doorstop list is set somewhere that doesn't exist.
A few threads never go away. There's a meditation and mind shelf (The Mind Illuminated, Tara Brach, Rick Hanson, Jack Kornfield). There's Judaism and Israel (Robert Alter's Bible translations, Micah Goodman, Shai Held, Angela Buchdahl, Pretend You Believe). And you read what's new: nearly half your books arrived within two years of publication, balanced by Homer, Cicero, Undset and Dickens.
If one thing ties the shelf together, it's an interest in how systems work and who builds them: kitchens, companies, climates, magic systems and traditions.