I’m writing today’s blog post much later than I had planned to do so, and do you know why? It’s because I started making a spreadsheet. I was having so much fun, I simply could not draw myself away to start writing a blog post – and the funny thing is, I like writing blog posts!
For a while now, I’ve felt like this website needs better archives for things – especially its reviews. You may have spotted that I have posted updated archive posts for each of the different video game franchises I’ve reviewed. On all of those, I’ve made a table which shows the year the game was released, the title and the score I gave it (along with a link, of course.) Just before bed last night, I had a great idea: why not make a huge table which lists every book that I’ve reviewed here? The excitement of the idea almost kept me from sleeping.
So today I started making this table. Adding the title, the author’s name, the year of publication, the type of book (e.g. novel, anthology, etc.) and finally my score. I have to say, adding a new thing onto this table was like eating out of a box of chocolates. “I’ll just add one more,” I’d tell myself, only to still be doing it half an hour later. But that’s where my comparison falls flat – it’s hard to stop eating chocolates, but eventually my stomach hurts from eating too much and I have to stop – but when it comes to updating a spreadsheet, nothing ever starts hurting, I love doing it and I can never stop. I never have to.
Eventually, I just had to close the tab, because it was getting late and sooner or later I’d spend so much time listing books I’ve read that it would cut into the time I have for actual reading! But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Why is it so satisfying to list things on spreadsheets and make lists? I can’t really explain. I guess, in a way, it now makes all reading activities feel like part of one big over-arching interconnected task, which is quite appealing, but generally speaking I struggle to explain the raw animalistic thrill I get from making spreadsheets and lists of things.
