As I have noted, 2025 has been a rough year for reading. I actually deleted my reading blog about a month ago, but decided to bring it back under this new name. Thanks to @manton for 1)making it so easy to import blog archives and 2)making micro.blog hands-down the best platform for book blogging.

Looking at the imported posts it is clear that the beginning of my D&D game was the thing that destroyed my reading habit for the last year. No regrets. We are loving the D&D game, but there are only so many hours in the day, and starting a good campaign is labor intensive.

Over the last few months, however, I noticed that I’d gone back to my hold habits of sitting in my chair at night and just dicking around on the internet. Yes, I might write a blog post here or there, but I really have’t been spending all that time working on my gaming campaigns. Why? Because working on stuff like that is tiring, and I have a limited amount of energy. I’ve found that the campaigns (both of them) go just as well with two hours a week of prep time as they do if I sit and agonize over them all evening every evening. In short, agonizing over them is both unpleasant and unproductive.

I found myself, as in my pre-book blogging life, going to bed feeling like I’d not really done anything substantial “for myself” each day. So I have rediscovered the joy of turning off the computer, putting away the phone, paying no attention to the TV, and reading for an hour or two in the evening. Just as before, it lets me go to bed with a sense of satisfaction. It also prepares my mind and body for sleep a lot better than staring at the computer screen (even though I read on a Kindle for the most part).

Right now, this very moment, I have 3.5 months left in the year. My goal is to finish with 16 SF novels read.