When I posted my review of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts on Monday, I didn’t notice that it was the 600th book I’d reviewed on this blog. I only noticed when I got around to updating my mildly obsessive spreadsheet.

As far as I can tell, my first review was of (sigh) The Da Vinci Code, posted in January 2005. I note in that post that I read the book on my (cringe) Pocket PC, which is a reading experience I have no memory of whatsoever. In the intervening (gasp) eighteen years, I’ve reviewed books by everyone from Adam Buxton to Zoë Heller, from A Chess Story to You Are What You Read.

The authors I’ve read most are David Sedaris, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. Only 51 books were translations, mostly commonly of French, Italian or Japanese works. Perhaps I need to expand my range.

At this point, a good blogger would link to an index of all the books they’ve reviewed to allow readers to click through and see what I made of their favourites. I don’t have one of those. Some posts don’t even have the book’s author tagged—I don’t think WordPress allowed tags when I started using it.

At this point, an average blogger would wang on about what they’ve learned, and about the joy of reading. But that just strikes me as a little worthily dull.

As a rubbish blogger, I’ll just make myself a hostage to fortune by saying that my 601st book review will be along tomorrow.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image for the prompt ‘a painting by Vermeer of a library of 600 books’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.