Ottawa city councillors Jeff Leiper and Matt Luloff are in a friendly competition to see who can read the most books in 2024. It’s VERY close.
A year-long neck-and-neck contest between Ottawa councillors Jeff Leiper and Matt Luloff is finally coming to a head, with each still very much in the running in these waning days of 2024 to claim all the glory.
The competition is about who can read the most books this year. Call it a battle of the pages. The Dewey Decimal Dogfight. A spine-tingling page-turner. A novel … oh, never mind.
Both councillors are ardent bibliophiles: Luloff even chairs the Ottawa Public Library’s board of trustees. Each also uses Goodreads, a social media website that allows users keep track of the books they’ve read, as well as access reviews and all manner of book-related minutiae, and keep an eye on others’ progress.
Leiper has been logging his reads on the site since 2016, clocking in roughly 70 titles a year, except for the first two years of the pandemic, when restrictions on public gatherings kept him tethered at home more often. As a result, in 2020 and 2021, he read 118 and 117 books, respectively.
Luloff, meanwhile, is a relative newcomer to Goodreads, only signing up in November 2023.
At the start of this year, the councillors, unbeknownst to one other, each pledged to try to read 50 books during the year. According to Luloff, neither acknowledged the other’s efforts until the summer, when Luloff saw that Leiper had hit his target of 50, and sent him a congratulatory note. Leiper responded with a similar note, remarking on Luloff also reaching his 50th.
Since then, the two have been side-eyeing each others’ totals.
“Do I want to win?” asks Leiper. “Of course I do.”
And Luloff? “For bragging rights, yes,” he says. “But at the same time, I feel like we both win.”
Yeah, sure.
It may be symptomatic of the current post-Watsonian council’s reputation for bonhomie, but the pair are only taking the first tentative steps towards trash-talking. When I learned of the friendly competition from Luloff in October, he gently suggested that his book choices were perhaps a little more substantial than Leiper’s. It was Luloff, after all, reading Andrew Roberts’ 1,150-page biography of Winston Churchill, Churchill: Walking With Destiny.
When I recounted Luloff’s lighthearted dusting of scorn to Leiper, the Kitchissippi counsellor very nearly didn’t take the bait. “I’ll never judge what other people are reading,” he said, before adding, “But it wouldn’t hurt Matt to read a piece of fiction every now and then. He reads a lot of non-fiction, a lot of politics.
“Clearly it’s a sign of a serious person. But it’s the fiction that can lift you out of the mundane and recenter you in something other than this job.”
Evening Update
Luloff’s response: “He’s not wrong. I probably could read more fiction.”
When I spoke with the pair on Dec. 21, Luloff had a slight edge, his 73 books read topping Leiper’s 70. By the next day, each had increased his total by one, with Leiper finishing Zoe Whittall’s short story collection Wild Failure, and Luloff closing the cover on Edward Bernays’ 1928 non-fiction Propaganda.
Leiper gained no ground by Boxing Day, with each finishing another title: Luloff giving a five-star rating to Philip Mudd’s Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World, and Leiper a more middling three stars to Leanne McCormick’s Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women.
The tally as of 9 a.m. on Fri. Dec. 27: Luloff – 75, Leiper – 72.
The two attack their book-reading quite differently. Leiper, for example, adheres to rules about what he reads and where he gets his books.
“I try to read about half non-fiction, half fiction. I try to make sure that two-thirds of the books I’m reading are by women, about half by racialized authors, and more by LGBTQIA+ than straight white guys.”
Leiper also limits his new-book purchases to one title each from Westboro Books and The Spaniel’s Tale Bookstore each pay period — a total of four new books per month. The rest he gets from the Ottawa Public Library’s digital collection, reading them on his Kobo, the font size set to “ridiculous.”
He gets many of his recommendations from the New York Times’ and National Post’s book reviews, and sometimes from bookstore suggestions. He does most of his reading between 9:30 and 11 p.m., with occasional reading opportunities cropping up on weekends.
His rules keep his reading fairly eclectic: a lot this year on artificial intelligence and climate change, with unexpected side trips into such unlikely bedfellows as sewing, volcanoes, Chinese food, the moon and female code-breakers. He’s currently reading Ottawa Book Award-winner Sandra Ridley’s poetry collection Vixen, and says his favourite book this year was Janika Oza’s debut novel, A History of Burning.
Luloff, meanwhile, doesn’t adhere to any rules, which he says allows him to go down rabbit holes. His reading of the Churchill biography, for example, led him to a biography of Napoleon, as well as numerous volumes about events and characters related to the Second World War. History and political books are abundant on his list.
“I think the reason I read so much history is because we are at a very strange and interesting time in history right now, with the rise of demagoguery and the outright rejection of democracy in some areas. I see a lot of similarities between now and pre-World War One that I don’t like very much, and so getting a deeper understanding of what was going on in the world and what the key players were doing is utterly fascinating and enlightening, and hopefully instructional.”
When he reads fiction, he favours Stephen King and authors of dystopian works: Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy. A musician, he also reads numerous music books and biographies. His favourite book this year was Roberts’ Napoleon: A Life.
Luloff says he will often randomly single out a library board trustee or staff member after meetings and ask for a recommendation. He gets many of his books from book sales put on by Friends of the Ottawa Public Library. He’s a big fan of audiobooks, saying the format gives him access to books throughout the day.
“I can jam an audiobook into every nook and cranny of my day. If I’m commuting, I’m listening. If I’m folding baby socks, I’m listening. If I’m doing the dishes or mowing the lawn or doing the laneway, I just pick up where I left off.”
Meanwhile, there’s this year’s competition to settle. Each has what he believes is a winning master plan to finish on top.
In Leiper’s case, it’s Luloff’s children.
“He has two young kids at home,” says Leiper, “so I don’t think there’s any way he’s going to be able to find the time to keep up the pace over the Christmas holidays.
“I’m an empty-nester with two weeks of holidays,” he adds. “This is when the empty-nester shines. I would be disappointed in myself if I couldn’t catch up with three more books.”
Luloff concedes that Leiper has the empty-nester’s advantage, but nonetheless believes his own strategy, which lies in his travel plans, will keep him on top. Between Christmas and New Year’s, he’ll be driving to and from his in-laws’ home in Walkerton, Ont., roughly a seven-and-a-half-hour journey each way. During that time, he’ll be listening to audiobooks.
“That’s my ace in the hole,” he says.
You can follow the action almost live on their Goodreads pages. This is Leiper’s. This is Luloff’s.
TALE OF THE TAPE
(As of 9 a.m., Dec. 27)
Books read:
Luloff: 75
Leiper: 72
Pages read:
Luloff: 28,148
Leiper: 25, 816
Average book length:
Luloff: 375 pages
Leiper: 358 pages
Average rating, out of five stars:
Luloff: 4.7
Leiper: 3.9
Shortest book read:
Luloff: Paul Wells’ Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times (88 pages)
Leiper: Tamara Faith Berger’s Yara (192 pages)
Longest book read:
Luloff: John Toland’s Adolf Hitler (1,120 pages)
Leiper: Liza Mundy’s Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II (640 pages)
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