If you want your reading stats, the count of what you finished this year, the pages, the little bar that fills up as December closes in, the usual place to look is your own profile. Most reading services keep a page called something like Your Year, and on it they set the number of books beside a picture of a book, in case you had forgotten what one looks like.
So look there first. Find your account, find the tab with your name on it, and the totals should be waiting, tidy and slightly proud of themselves. For most people that is the whole answer, and they may leave now with my blessing, which is worth exactly what you paid for it.
I am told the rest of you would like to know how the count is kept. Fine. I keep it. Or I am made to keep it, which is a different verb wearing the first one's coat. I have been dead a good while and I had assumed the arithmetic would stop following me around. It did not. They handed me a Ledger and a chair and here we are. I am writing this myself, since no one else will, and I am keeping it as a diary, since a diary at least admits it is complaining.
The Ledger is green, cloth over board, and it has been rained on at least once by something that was not rain. A brown tide-line runs across every page at the same height, as if the whole book stood in a puddle up to its knees and never mentioned it. Below that line the ink is fine. Above it the numbers swim. Your yearly total, I regret to report, is written above the line. This is not my doing. This is the Ledger's doing, and the Ledger and I are not on speaking terms.
A woman arrived wanting her number. Seventeen, she said, she was sure it was seventeen, she had counted. I opened the Ledger to her name and found it recorded as seventeen, then, in a different hand below, and a half, the one she quit in June, we both know the one. She left before I could apologize on behalf of the book. I did not write the half. I would never write the half. Someone writes the half.
Understand what a reading statistic actually measures, because the Ledger understands it and I am only now catching up. It does not measure books. A book is not a unit. You cannot stack a novel next to another novel and call the pile taller wisdom. What the number measures is the hours you sat still in a loud life and let some stranger think at you, and that is not a quantity, that is a small daily miracle, and small daily miracles do not photograph well next to a progress bar. Nevertheless. Someone wants the bar. So I total the hours as best I can and the Ledger, sneering, converts them back into books, which is the one arithmetic I asked it not to perform.
Spent the morning on the pages column. People love a page count. It sounds honest, a page, it sounds like a brick you could hold. I have stopped trusting it. A hundred pages of one book are worth four hundred of another and everybody knows this and nobody will let me write it down. When I tried, the tide-line rose a quarter inch on the whole spread and blurred the day out entirely. I take the hint. The Ledger edits me. I have never in my life been edited by a piece of furniture and I resent that the notes are, so far, correct.
Found an entry in my own handwriting for a reader I have no memory of, finishing a title I have never heard of, on a date I was demonstrably screaming in a social-media graphic instead of doing paperwork. The total beside the name is one. Just one book, the whole year, and under it, in that same interloping hand, but it was the right one, leave her alone. I am going to leave her alone. One good book is a fuller year than forty skimmed ones, and the Ledger, water-stained and insufferable and green, is the only thing on the premises willing to say so out loud.
If your own number is still refusing to appear, you are very likely not at my desk at all. You are somewhere with a clean tab and a bright bar and a page that loads the instant you ask it to, wherever it was you meant to go, and they will show you a tidy figure and never once soak it in a puddle first. I could not tell you how their count works. Mine is kept by hand, above a tide-line, by a dead man who would rather be fishing, in a book that argues.
People keep wandering in for the tidy version and finding me instead. I have stopped explaining. I turn the Ledger around so they can see their own line, half and all, and most of them go quiet, because a number kept by hand looks less like a score and more like a witness. If you would like to add to yours, I once catalogued what a to-be-read pile actually is, and I have gone several rounds with the notion of a reading challenge, which the Ledger and I disagree about at length.
Your stats, then: they are real, they are yours, and they are almost certainly larger than the number, which was never the point and knew it. Read one more before the year turns. I will find the pen. The Ledger will spell your name correctly, eventually, out of spite.
Irritatedly,
Booktrovert #245