research & interestswhat I read · 2014–2026
310 books · 12 threads · 2014–2026

A terrain of what flowed in. Time runs left to right; each ridge is a thread of interest, its height the books read that year. Watch the mind move — from the lone peak of adventure to the great swell of the canon, down through philosophy and McCarthy's grit. Tap a ridge or a name to study one thread.

2014 ◂──── time ────▸ 2026

by the numbers

310 · 92kbooks · pages
read since you joined Goodreads — ≈92,000 pages, avg 297 a book (longest: Atlas Shrugged, 1,168)
1 / 4.6days
peak pace, 2019 — 80 books in a year, incl. 11 Steinbeck + 9 Fitzgerald devoured at once
16 · 7books · yrs
McCarthy is the spine — the only author present at both ends of the map (2019→2026)
1942
median pub-year of the books you read in 2019. You read the dead — in 2014 it was 2006; the year you got serious it fell ~65 yrs and stayed mid-century
92.6%
male authors. Of the 7.4% women, half are just Rand (5) + Didion (3)
1.46×
more books finished in winter than summer — the cold and the reading go together
165
distinct authors — but your top 10 are 31% of everything. Concentrated obsession, wide exploration
30
books queued to-read — and they swerve hard into political theory (Schmitt · Strauss · Girard) + the classical roots (Homer · Virgil · Rome)

what's next — the queue

Your to-read shelf isn't a continuation; it's a turn. By the 2-year lag, this is what your writing bends toward next.

Political theory / power ~20%

Hobbes · Carl Schmitt · Leo Strauss · René Girard · Wittgenstein. The canon of sovereignty, order & mimetic desire — the founder/operator's reading.

Classical foundations ~13%

The Iliad · The Aeneid · Paradise Lost · SPQR. Reaching under the American canon to the roots it rests on.

The maximalist doorstops ~37%

Gravity's Rainbow · 2666 · The Magic Mountain · Anna Karenina · Middlemarch · Les Misérables · Gass ×2. Canon-completion, the hard tier.

Spiritual / nature ~17%

Siddhartha · Bonhoeffer · The Snow Leopard · The Peregrine. The inner & the wild.

The tell is what's absent: zero poetry, zero McCarthy, zero Southern Gothic queued — the exact threads that fed your fiction. The reading is voting for the builder, not the novelist.