One of my goals for this year is to make more time to read. It seems that I have to be intentional about reading even though I love it. I think there are just too many distractions. TV shows, movies, video games, social media, it has all gotten to be a bit much and everything thing tries to squeeze everything else out. I noticed at some point I was buying books and not necessarily reading them. It was only a few years ago that I read a whopping 4 books in a year with three of them being collected editions of some comic books. That is not me or at least it is not the person I want to be. After that year I have been increasing my reading with completing 30 books or more the past two years. While that is not better it is still not keeping pace with how many books I need to be reading to get through my library before my inevitable but untimely death…whenever that occurs.
Historically, I stuck to a one book at a time approach. As long as I am enjoying the book this works out fine. I start a book, read it though to the end and move on to the next one but if I start reading a book that I am not really into it results in stopping the book and not picking up something else. I have an irrational aversion to DNFing (Did Not Finish) books. I have no good reason for that. I just have this compulsion to finish a book once I have started it. This psychosis results in periodic reading slumps that I want to stop.
With that in mind I tried an experiment in March. The hypothesis was that if I started more books I would never hit a reading slump because I could always pick up something else that might interest me at the moment. In my head I know I will eventually finish them all so the DNF condition never kicks in, or at least that is the idea. I start 5 books in March and added 2 more as I finished others and ended up finishing 3 books in total for the month with over 1500 pages read. While not a record for me, it was still the most pages read going back at least two years with the exception of Christmas 2023 where I read over 2,000 pages in made dash to meet my 30 book goal for that year. So I consider March a success. I don’t, however, know if my approach was the driving factor.
I am always mindful that correlation does not equal causation and that is at least potentially at work here. I read more pages yes, but I think I also spent more time reading. I also THINK I read a few books that were just fast, easy reads. I am not sure really how to measure this process to get a better understanding of what gets me to read more pages but more thought has to be put in. Did I read more hours than normal (pretty sure I did)? How does words per page change the statistics? Are some books just going to read slower (likely)? Is page count even an valuable measure? I don’t know the answers to any of this. All I do know is that there is a lot of stuff I really WANT to read and I don’t know if I can get it all in and that is kind of depressing.
Anyway, here is to reading good books!