tl;dr: I added a books section to my website where I track my progress of all the books I read (or audiobooks I listen too). My goal is to read at least 12 books every year.
As mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of social media platforms. I banned almost all of them from my life. I deleted my Facebook account years ago, Twitter followed soon after, and at the beginning of 2025, it was time to let go of Instagram. I did this because I realised I spent too much time just mindlessly scrolling through my timelines, checking for new content, over and over again, post after post. I spent hours this way – hours I will never get back. So I had to stop. I deleted my accounts, deleted the apps, and never looked back.
As you might have noticed, I did not turn my back on social media completely. I got myself a Mastodon account to take a peak into the Fediverse. But I'm constantly reminding myself not to fall back into old habits. I carefully select who and what I follow and try not to overdo it.
You can follow me here if you like: social.anoxinon.de/@the1klpx
The last remaining platform I use is YouTube. Their Shorts section works the same way as X, Instagram, or TikTok (which I thankfully never used) and is highly addictive. But I can't let go of YouTube at the moment because it has a lot of amazing content, especially tutorials for literally everything. But what I can do is reduce my time there, which I did by cancelling more than 90% of my subscriptions. I only kept a selected few that I usually watch for educational reasons, not for pure distraction.
With all this done, I now have a lot of spare time that I need to fill with more productive things – things that are fun, let me learn, or just don't feel like a complete waste of time. Like building this blog, for instance. Or improving my typing skills. Or (and this is what this post is actually about) reading more books.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to spend more time reading. I know, I know, New Year's resolutions are usually bullshit, but this is different. Trust me. I always enjoyed reading books from an early age – in school, in my grandparents' garden, on Christmas, on holidays, at night under the blanket with a flashlight. But as I got older, I found more hobbies, had a girlfriend, a job… there was less and less time for reading books.
But I never stopped buying books. Especially eBooks. Just recently, I started putting them all in a Calibre library and, to my shock, realised that I had collected more than 700 (!) eBooks over the years, most of which I have never once opened. And on top of that, I had also bought (or received as gifts) a few more analogue books that now sit on my bookshelf and have been sitting there for years.
This has to stop.
Therefore, to motivate myself and make my progress more visible, I added a books section to this blog, which you can find in the menu above. Sadly the idea is not my own; it's something I found on Spencer Harston's website and shamelessly adopted for myself. Thanks, Spencer.
So there you have it. All these many words and digressions just to say: "I added a new feature to my site." Follow my progress if you like. Maybe this motivates you, dear reader, to take up a book yourself. If so, let me know. It would make me very happy.