A change to my reading goals
My reading has dropped so much in the last few years that I am inching closer to the average 8 books in a year (3rd paragraph), and that scares me. In my best years (admittedly when I had considerably less responsibility and a job where I could read while working) I was reading between 80 and 100 books a year. Last year I read 22 books. Which was technically fine, but so very few compared to what I used to do. Right now I have read 9 books, and there's less than 3 1/2 months left in the year (where has the year gone?). To reach my reading goal of 25, I have to read 16 books in that time, and I don't know if that's possible with my current habits.
Here's the thing, though. While I don't finish as many books, I do still read. I just... don't finish. There's a few reasons. One, I'm more picky about what I read. There's not enough time in the world to read everything so it's not worth it to keep reading something that isn't good. Two, my taste has changed a lot and I'm trying to read more difficult things. Maybe difficult is the wrong word. More dense things. And they take longer to read, and often are not as engaging so while I want to keep reading them, there's not the insistent need to pick them up again. And three, my crushing visual media addiction...
So I did some data crunching and took my stats from the past 14 years (which is how long I've been tracking my reading), both books read and pages read, something I've never looked at before. Here's what I found: The worst year year was 2024, where I only read 12 books and 3,127 pages. I'm hoping to do better than that this year because I'm currently at 9 books and 3,283 pages. My best year was in 2014, when I read 111 books and a staggering 40,269 pages. The fourteen year average is 43.3 books and 14,596 pages. The mean for those years is 28 books and 9,121 pages. And this is all only considering the pages of books I finished, not at all considering pages of books I read but didn't finish.
Which brings me to what I want to change. I still want to reach a specific book number goal, because if I don't have a goal then I end up not finishing things. But I want to add a page goal to it. Right now I'm at 3,283 pages, and theoretically if I read ten pages every day until the end of the year I can hit 4,333 pages for the year. So I'm going to say for the last quarter of the year my goal is to reach 15 books read (cut down from 25) and 4,000 pages, and track pages every day so I include the books I don't end up finishing. Then this year won't be my worst year since I started tracking. Just my second worst.
Do you have reading goals? Do you keep track of your reading? Let me know!
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