A better reading goal
12/31 2022
Like so many others I've found that setting a reading goal (on a public website like Goodreads) tends to make me read more, which is a good thing. It especially helps, I find, with realizing when you don't enjoy a book as much as you ought (there isn't enough time on earth to drudge through a bad book, let alone all the good ones). But, something which has annoyed me lately is the fact that it tends to make me more focused on finishing the book, and less on actually enjoying it. Some books require more time than others, like Miss Dalloway, which despite only being ~190 pages takes (at least for me) a long time to get through. Not necessarily because it is bad, mind you, merely because it is written in a way that requires it. Which is when I stumbled on a blog post by The Commonplace (here), where they talked about having a reading goal set on categories instead, which I thought was a great idea. So here goes nothing, my reading goal for 2023:
- [X] A modernist classic (Read Portrait of an artist as a young man)
- [X] A heavy tome (Read Buddenbrooks)
- [X] Something from a South American 20th century author (Read Borges' Collected Fictions)
- [ ] Mind-altering science fiction (e.g. Philip K. Dick)
- [ ] A book outside of my comfort zone (e.g. Sally Rooney)
- [X] Something light, something fantasy YA (Read Wool by Hugh Howey, couldn't wait for season 2 to find out what the deal was [spoiler alert], disappointed.)
- [X] Classic poetry (Read Keats' Selected Poetry [Oxford])
- [X] Non-fiction about stuff I should know (Read Rubicon by Tom Holland)
2024 Update
Well, now it's officially a new year and a new year for reading. How did 2023 go? Well, I think pretty good, but the categorical reading list had little to no impact on the way that I chose to read, they boxes above that I managed to check just happened to get checked in virtue of what interested me at the time. Therefore I'll do the following for 2024: nothing. No reading goal, no categorical reading list. Just read what I want to read, no distractions. Seems simple enough.
