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Louis L'Amour's Westerns have never struck a chord with me. Doesn't make them bad, just not something that flows in my direction.
But I did run across his autobiography, "Education of a Wandering Man," and thought it was wonderful. Self-taught, he never stopped learning, never ceased to wonder.
In this book, he wrote that while a young man he went through a period where he kept a ledger in which he entered every book he read, title and author. As I recall (and I don't want to double check for fear I'll ruin a perfectly good memory with too much accuracy), L'Amour wrote that he kept this reading journal to keep track of where his journey of the mind had taken him – a sort of road map of his education.
I immediately began my own reading ledger – a simple list I've kept up to date to this very day. I find it entertaining, and sometimes instructive, to revisit what I've read in the past years. (And when I first began the journal, out of curiosity I reconstructed as much as I could of the few years immediately before.)
One thing I notice right up front in looking over this list is how the number of books I read per year dropped off once parenthood arrived in '91. Funny how that works.
For no good reason at all, I'm posting my reading journal here as I get it done (starting with the most recent years first), adding a quick (one or two sentence) reaction to the book, as well as links if it strikes your fancy and you want to buy it. They're posted with the most recent read on top.