Total pages read for January 2026 was 607.
First up was to begin reading Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship again. I first read it in 2017 and got around 90 pages in this time until I stopped. It’s fairly heavy going and I found I wasn’t giving it sufficient attention.
Given that I was reading something translated from German, I thought I’d pick some fiction also translated from German. I considered some Kafka but settled on Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front instead. In the Dedication the author states that the work is neither an accusation nor a confession. Neat.
Total pages read for December 2025 was 1,194.
I finished Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium. It was something of an epic story covering a lot of territory in its 650+ pages.
Those that were started and finished in the month were Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was an ugly, unattractive story - but I guess that’s the idea of gothic horror. I also read Dick Eastman’s The Hour that Changes the World, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Woodrow Kroll’s booklet How the Book was Born.
My total pages read for November was 1,320.
I finished Kenneth E. Hagin’s The Woman Question.
I started and finished the final four Hardy Boys books that are currently in the public domain: Hunting for Hidden Gold, The Shore Road Mystery, The Secret of the Caves, and The Mystery of Cabin Island.
My next assignment was to begin to tackle Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium. I first bought this book around 25 years ago (at a guess). I had started it previously but didn’t make much progress. It came to mind when I read somewhere that some of Lawheads’ other works are being made into movies or a TV series. At the end of November I was around two-thirds of my way through the book.
Well, Bible rebind #1 is complete. I completed the process over about six days doing a small range of tasks each day. The process wasn’t as difficult as I imagined it would be. It was a matter of proceeding a step at a time carefully measuring, cutting, glueing, smoothing. Rinse and repeat.
The outcome is far from perfect, and I would/will do a couple of things differently next time. But I’m content with the result - a useable, serviceable rebound Bible.
We’ve got three Bibles that are fairly frequently read and are falling apart in various places. I have a Crossway ESV Single Column Legacy Bible in ‘Trutone’ where the cover is flaking and the cover is separating from the end papers. I had taped it up with duct tape a number of years ago to secure the cover but the faux leather continues to flake off, make a mess and look unsightly.
My total pages read for October was 1,789. I finished one I started in September (Murray), started and finished four (Jane Eyre and three Hardy Boys), and started another (Hagin).
At the end of September I had commenced Andrew Murray’s Abide with Christ. Many of Andrew’s books are designed to be read a chapter a day for 31 days so I got in step with the calendar and read a chapter a day to coincide with the date.
My total pages read for September was 1,928. This number may be on the high side as I’m reading more on my ereader than previously and the page numbers I’m recording are actually screen numbers.
A quick search of word counts per page in the interwebs yields somewhere around 250-300 words per page for a novel. My ereader seems to have around 230-240 words per screen so my page count may be around 15% overstated.
My total pages read for August was 1,334.
I started and finished five books during the month: Kenneth E. Hagin’s Commonsense Guide to Fasting and How to Walk in Love. Both of these Hagin books are quite small. I also reread A.W. Tozer’s God’s Power for Your Life, Peter Durbin’s What’s Really Going On? and Joel C. Rosenberg’s The Persian Gamble which is the second in his Marcus Ryker series.
I started reading Dallas Willard’s Hearing God but stopped after about 40 pages.
My total pages read for July was 448 which included finishing three books and continuing in one.
The three I finished were Tomasi’s The Leopard, and two works by Kenneth Hagin: The Believer’s Authority and a mini book Learning to Flow with the Spirit of God.
The Leopard is a novel centred on an Italian aristocrat in the middle of the nineteenth century as the revolution led by Garibaldi unfolds. The two works by Kenneth E. Hagin are both biblical and practical.
No, this is not some deep theological or philosophical treatise but instead a declaration that one of our notebooks, an HP Envy Ultrabook 6, is no more.
As far as I can tell we bought it in August 2012 so it was close to 13 years old. It had fairly heavy use in its earlier days - so much so that the monitor hinge broke and we left it open most of the time once it had been repaired.