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mamajoanPartway through 2007, I discovered the "50 Books Challenge" on LibraryThing.com. This is a thing where people challenge themselves to read 50 books in a year, and there's a whole community discussion board thing on the site where people can brag about their progress, post about the books they've read, give each other encouragement and ideas, and so forth.
Well, the year was already partway over at that point, so I decided to set myself a "25 books in six months" challenge. I had just started a new job with a subway commute -- my first time not driving to work in many years -- so it was the perfect time to start getting back into reading. I succeeded in that mini-challenge, actually finishing 26 books in the six-month time period, and ending up with 34 books for the year.
The following several years in a row, I continued challenging myself. For 2008 and 2009 I decided to aim for 40 books, and actually read 43 in each of those years. In 2010 I aimed for 50 for the first time and made it to 57; in 2011 I read 62 books total. (I only counted books that I read for myself, and that I read entirely, cover-to-cover; some were re-reads of books I had read before, and that counted; reading books aloud to the kids, even full-length chapter books such as Little House in the Big Woods, didn't count.) Along the way I set myself some mini-challenges as well, such as to read more scifi by women, more scifi by authors of color, more nonfiction, and similar.
I used LibraryThing to track the books I was reading, though I didn't really participate in the discussion forums. I catalog all of my books on LT and it was easy enough to add tags for "read in 2007" "read in 2008" and so forth. I enjoyed adding each new book to the tag and seeing the numbers go up, going back and looking through the lists of books on each tags, and so forth.
Then in 2012 I decided to take a break from the tracking. I started to feel like it had become a competition with myself -- like the numbers, and the drive to push them ever higher, were starting to overshadow what's supposed to be the main point, i.e., to enjoy the reading, to savor the books. Sometimes I finish reading a book and feel like I need to take some time to savor it, digest it, let it sink in. But it had gotten to the point where I was pushing myself to start another book immediately, lest my numbers "slip." And that's ridiculous and crazy, since there was no competition except in my mind, and no one to impress.
Also, midway through 2012 I got a Kindle and started downloading a bunch of free books -- some of which are novella-length, shorter than a full novel; some of which were so terrible that I couldn't finish them; and so forth. So I was unsure how I wanted to factor any of that in to my tracking system, so I decided to just not worry about it and go back to just plain enjoying what I read. Which of course includes not feeling obligated to finish something really bad -- except in the case of books that I get through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program (LTER). I generally force myself to finish those so that I can write a review, even if it's terrible, because that's the point of the program.
So then, having freed myself from thinking about the numbers, I found that another thing happened: I stopped reading books entirely for a while. At some point I finished a book and looked at all the books I still had sitting around unread (both in hardcopy and Kindle format) and just kind of went, "meh" and didn't pick anything else up. On my commutes, instead of reading, I was doing sudoku puzzles on my smartphone, or crosswords, or playing Bejeweled, or just sitting with my eyes closed. I started working through the enormous stacks of Boston Globe Sunday Magazines that had piled up while I was busy pushing myself to read read read and thinking that magazines "didn't count." (My mom subscribes to the Globe and saves the Sunday magazine for me every week, because I like the crosswords. I always make myself flip through the magazine itself before I allow myself to start the crossword -- I don't read every article, but I at least glance at each page. It's another of those weird superstition games that I play with myself.)
Meanwhile, I got a few more books from LTER, and they sat around glaring at me, making me feel guilty, reminding me that I made the explicit commitment to read them under the terms of the program. But aside from that, I wasn't feeling any guilt about taking a break from reading. It was freeing; I felt relief, as silly as that might sound, from the pressure that I had been putting on myself around it.
Then I was at a friend's house and noticed a book sitting on her table with an odd title. It was The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. I asked my friend about it and she said that she was partway through it and not yet sure what she thought. A week or two later she gave it to me, saying that she had finished it and thought I would like it. For whatever reason, even though I had really been enjoying my sort of sabbatical from reading books, I opened it up. Two days later I gave it back to her and she was all, "you read it already?!" It was a fun little book, translated from the Swedish, about a guy who...well, what the title says.
Then I looked around my bedroom and noticed one of the LTER books sitting there, which was Bend Not Break, a memoir by a woman named Ping Fu who grew up being persecuted by Mao's Red Guard in China, then eventually came to America, learned English, learned to program computers, and ended up founding a hugely successful software company. I picked that up and zipped through it in a few days as well. Then I dug out my Kindle from wherever it had ended up during the move, and after charging its sadly neglected battery back up, I turned it on and found a book that I had started a month or two ago but not been able to get into, which is The Killing Moon by NK Jemisin (who is a woman of color, and I follow her on Twitter and she's quite cool). I pushed myself back into it and whaddaya know, after a few screens I was hooked. Maybe the book is slow to get going, or maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it when I started it a few weeks back. Who knows? I'm about halfway through it now. I'm already planning in which order to read three other books after I finish this one.
And just now I went to LibraryThing and fleshed out my "Read in 2012" tag a bit, at least adding the books I can see on my Kindle that I know I read last year. That brought me up to 27 for the year, and I'm sure the real total is higher because there are books I'm not remembering...and that's okay. 27 is already pretty good for "a year when I didn't read very much"! :)
So the moral of the story, I suppose, is that I enjoy reading more when I enjoy reading. How's that for a tautology?
(Postscript: It may be ironic that while all of this was happening with me, Isaac was going from "a kid who can read" to "a kid who likes to read" to "a kid who reads all the time"! He has been working his way through the Harry Potter series, and as the books get thicker and heavier, he's worked out a system whereby he keeps a school-library copy in his desk at school, and another copy at home. This way he doesn't have to lug that monstrosity back and forth every day. Serendipitously, last weekend, as he was nearing the end of the 4th book, we popped into Goodwill and spotted a copy of the 5th book on the shelf. But we didn't pick it up, as we were browsing around the store, and then when we finished browsing I asked Isaac if he wanted that book and he said yes, so we went back to where we had seen it, and it was gone. D'oh! I said, "oh well, someone else must have taken it. We should have grabbed it while we had the chance." Just then Ruthie, who had been trailing along well behind us as we wandered the store, said, "Do I really have to carry this? It's heavy!" LOL!! She had picked up the book when she saw us commenting on it, and we hadn't realized she was carrying it the whole time. Anyway, we bought it, of course, and Isaac has just started it. It's awesome to see him becoming such a bookworm.)
Well, the year was already partway over at that point, so I decided to set myself a "25 books in six months" challenge. I had just started a new job with a subway commute -- my first time not driving to work in many years -- so it was the perfect time to start getting back into reading. I succeeded in that mini-challenge, actually finishing 26 books in the six-month time period, and ending up with 34 books for the year.
The following several years in a row, I continued challenging myself. For 2008 and 2009 I decided to aim for 40 books, and actually read 43 in each of those years. In 2010 I aimed for 50 for the first time and made it to 57; in 2011 I read 62 books total. (I only counted books that I read for myself, and that I read entirely, cover-to-cover; some were re-reads of books I had read before, and that counted; reading books aloud to the kids, even full-length chapter books such as Little House in the Big Woods, didn't count.) Along the way I set myself some mini-challenges as well, such as to read more scifi by women, more scifi by authors of color, more nonfiction, and similar.
I used LibraryThing to track the books I was reading, though I didn't really participate in the discussion forums. I catalog all of my books on LT and it was easy enough to add tags for "read in 2007" "read in 2008" and so forth. I enjoyed adding each new book to the tag and seeing the numbers go up, going back and looking through the lists of books on each tags, and so forth.
Then in 2012 I decided to take a break from the tracking. I started to feel like it had become a competition with myself -- like the numbers, and the drive to push them ever higher, were starting to overshadow what's supposed to be the main point, i.e., to enjoy the reading, to savor the books. Sometimes I finish reading a book and feel like I need to take some time to savor it, digest it, let it sink in. But it had gotten to the point where I was pushing myself to start another book immediately, lest my numbers "slip." And that's ridiculous and crazy, since there was no competition except in my mind, and no one to impress.
Also, midway through 2012 I got a Kindle and started downloading a bunch of free books -- some of which are novella-length, shorter than a full novel; some of which were so terrible that I couldn't finish them; and so forth. So I was unsure how I wanted to factor any of that in to my tracking system, so I decided to just not worry about it and go back to just plain enjoying what I read. Which of course includes not feeling obligated to finish something really bad -- except in the case of books that I get through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program (LTER). I generally force myself to finish those so that I can write a review, even if it's terrible, because that's the point of the program.
So then, having freed myself from thinking about the numbers, I found that another thing happened: I stopped reading books entirely for a while. At some point I finished a book and looked at all the books I still had sitting around unread (both in hardcopy and Kindle format) and just kind of went, "meh" and didn't pick anything else up. On my commutes, instead of reading, I was doing sudoku puzzles on my smartphone, or crosswords, or playing Bejeweled, or just sitting with my eyes closed. I started working through the enormous stacks of Boston Globe Sunday Magazines that had piled up while I was busy pushing myself to read read read and thinking that magazines "didn't count." (My mom subscribes to the Globe and saves the Sunday magazine for me every week, because I like the crosswords. I always make myself flip through the magazine itself before I allow myself to start the crossword -- I don't read every article, but I at least glance at each page. It's another of those weird superstition games that I play with myself.)
Meanwhile, I got a few more books from LTER, and they sat around glaring at me, making me feel guilty, reminding me that I made the explicit commitment to read them under the terms of the program. But aside from that, I wasn't feeling any guilt about taking a break from reading. It was freeing; I felt relief, as silly as that might sound, from the pressure that I had been putting on myself around it.
Then I was at a friend's house and noticed a book sitting on her table with an odd title. It was The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. I asked my friend about it and she said that she was partway through it and not yet sure what she thought. A week or two later she gave it to me, saying that she had finished it and thought I would like it. For whatever reason, even though I had really been enjoying my sort of sabbatical from reading books, I opened it up. Two days later I gave it back to her and she was all, "you read it already?!" It was a fun little book, translated from the Swedish, about a guy who...well, what the title says.
Then I looked around my bedroom and noticed one of the LTER books sitting there, which was Bend Not Break, a memoir by a woman named Ping Fu who grew up being persecuted by Mao's Red Guard in China, then eventually came to America, learned English, learned to program computers, and ended up founding a hugely successful software company. I picked that up and zipped through it in a few days as well. Then I dug out my Kindle from wherever it had ended up during the move, and after charging its sadly neglected battery back up, I turned it on and found a book that I had started a month or two ago but not been able to get into, which is The Killing Moon by NK Jemisin (who is a woman of color, and I follow her on Twitter and she's quite cool). I pushed myself back into it and whaddaya know, after a few screens I was hooked. Maybe the book is slow to get going, or maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it when I started it a few weeks back. Who knows? I'm about halfway through it now. I'm already planning in which order to read three other books after I finish this one.
And just now I went to LibraryThing and fleshed out my "Read in 2012" tag a bit, at least adding the books I can see on my Kindle that I know I read last year. That brought me up to 27 for the year, and I'm sure the real total is higher because there are books I'm not remembering...and that's okay. 27 is already pretty good for "a year when I didn't read very much"! :)
So the moral of the story, I suppose, is that I enjoy reading more when I enjoy reading. How's that for a tautology?
(Postscript: It may be ironic that while all of this was happening with me, Isaac was going from "a kid who can read" to "a kid who likes to read" to "a kid who reads all the time"! He has been working his way through the Harry Potter series, and as the books get thicker and heavier, he's worked out a system whereby he keeps a school-library copy in his desk at school, and another copy at home. This way he doesn't have to lug that monstrosity back and forth every day. Serendipitously, last weekend, as he was nearing the end of the 4th book, we popped into Goodwill and spotted a copy of the 5th book on the shelf. But we didn't pick it up, as we were browsing around the store, and then when we finished browsing I asked Isaac if he wanted that book and he said yes, so we went back to where we had seen it, and it was gone. D'oh! I said, "oh well, someone else must have taken it. We should have grabbed it while we had the chance." Just then Ruthie, who had been trailing along well behind us as we wandered the store, said, "Do I really have to carry this? It's heavy!" LOL!! She had picked up the book when she saw us commenting on it, and we hadn't realized she was carrying it the whole time. Anyway, we bought it, of course, and Isaac has just started it. It's awesome to see him becoming such a bookworm.)
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Date: 2013-01-29 09:32 pm (UTC)Interesting how your reading practice, for want of a better term, waxed and waned and then waxed again under the scrutiny of a self-imposed challenge. Thanks for this post.