With time to spare, I am in sight of ten thousand pages for the year, a goal I don't often achieve. E-books made it possible, contributing about two-thirds of the total. A lot of these were free downloads, starting with a bootleg copy of Orwell's amazing The Road to Wigan Pier, which paired well with The People of the Abyss, but mostly Gutenberg classics.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were good reading; the first made me wonder what all the fuss over content was about, the second relieved my confusion. Additional hits were The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories...

William Clark Russell was a great discovery. I much enjoyed The Wreck of the Grosvenor, The Death Ship, and The Frozen Pirate (though this last title had some passages that made Mark Twain's racial insensitivity seem mild).

Reamde was a $3 selection on Bookperk, and with a November repeat of Quicksilver gave me nearly 2000 pages from the author who dominates a word cloud based on my reading records.

Most of my more serious reading is still on paper, where I can scribble notes. The News: A User’s Manual was a reminder to focus on things of lasting importance, mostly unheeded, with some memorable exceptions.

And one more Alain de Botton title, thanks to a Hubski tip.

Vaclav Smil's Making the Modern World was relatively small and densely-packed, like the landfills he says are the endpoint for much of Europe's recycling.

Collection rates of post-consumer plastic waste are impressive, more than 90% in eight EU countries and in Switzerland, and an average of 43% (25.1 Mt) in 2011 for the EU-27; but more than 40% (10.3 Mt) of collected plastics were then landfilled and of the 14.9 Mt (60%) that were recovered nearly 9 Mt were incinerated (energy recovery) and only about 6 Mt (or close to 10% of annual production) were recycled (Plastics Europe, 2019).