Reading to the Numbers

This morning I finished my forty-eighth book for the year.  I am very pleased with that.

Each year I set an arbitrary goal for myself to read at least four books a month, or forty-eight books over the course of the year.  I put no other demands on my reading, other than trying to read four books a month.  I know some people set page goals for the week, or conditions that the books have to be over 300 pages or not counting re-reading books in the overall total.  I’m not that picky with my goal.  I aim for forty-eight individual works read cover-to-cover.  I do not distinguish between book formats, so an audio book or an electronic book on my Kindle counts as a book, just the same as a physical paper copy does.  I figure if there is effort to read or pay attention to the book it should count.  I do make a note in my listing for the year what format the book was in, but that is mainly to see how owning a Kindle has changed my reading.  

So far, having owned the Kindle for three years, I can say that I still do most of my reading as paper copies.  But then, I am a fairly tactile person.  I’m always picking up or touching things, and I prefer the feel of a paper book to the feel of the Kindle.  But I’m really not picky about the format for books I want to read.  One of the biggest disadvantages of the Kindle is that I find it is harder to flip to a particular page in the Kindle.  That could be more because I remember passages in the context of their location, for example, the passage I like in Anne of the Island where Anne accepts Gilbert’s proposal is near the end of the book on the righthand page and begins about midway down.  The passage that had such a huge impact on me about the younger generation no longer heeding the advice of the older generation in Murder in Montparnasse is in the first third of the book, on top third of the lefthand page, right before a break in the chapter.  I can literally see the passages in the books as much as I can remember them.  To find those same passages on my Kindle, it would require bookmarks or highlights which feel too much like writing in books for my tastes.  Maybe one day I will get used to books in an electronic form, but for now, I still love old-school paper too much for that.

My Kindle has really not changed the way I read, and I'm not sure if has had an affect on what I read.  This year, like most previous years, the vast majority of the books read have been mysteries, and specifically cozy mysteries, but I had read other things as well.  While only three of this year’s forty-eight book have been on my Kindle, I have read more straight fiction than in past years and even thrown in a few non-fiction reads.  My reading tastes have always run away from bestsellers -- nothing makes me drop a book faster than it being talked about everywhere! -- but I’ve no problem reading popular books after they have gone out of the front pages and dropped off the bestseller lists.  This year I read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and like the other bestsellers I have finally gotten around to reading, I wondered why I had waited so long to read it.  But then again, I am sure that enjoyment of the book comes not only from the book itself, but also my frame of mind during and timing of the reading of the book.  Had I read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at any other time, I am not sure I would have enjoyed it half as much.  Like so many other things, it came at the right time for it.  The time may eventually come for me to finally read the Harry Potter series, but it has not as of yet.

I am very pleased with my reading this year.  I am truly excited that I have hit my goal with three months to spare, fifteen days of which will be on a cruise ship with no real demands on my time and plentiful opportunities to while away the hours with a book as the water slips by beneath me.  I am planning my cruise reading now, and am trying to decide if seven paper books and sixteen on the Kindle are sufficient for the trip.  Part of me thinks that’s a bit of overkill, but the bigger part of me is terrified of being on the ship and running out of reading material.  That would be a tragedy.  I am sure that hell is a library filled with nothing but trashy, Harlequin-eqsue romance novels I have no interest in ever reading.

Once a co-worker gave me a book as part of a Secret Santa gift exchange.  She gave me some pulpy Danielle Steele novel she picked up in the check-out line at the grocery.  In my expression of gratitude, I asked her about the book, trying to figure out why she picked that book to give to me.  She explained that she knew I was a reader, and that was a book, so I must want it.  After successfully avoiding rolling my eyes heavenward in her presence, I thanked her profusely -- a bit too profusely perhaps, and headed off to figure out how to dispose of the book without her knowing.  I needn’t have worried, she never bothered checking up on my enjoyment of the book.  In fact, a few months later I overheard her commenting to another co-worker that she hadn’t read a book in 20 years and saw no need to do so because, “everything interesting is on tv eventually.”  It ceased to surprise me that she had chose the first book she came to as a good gift for a reader.  After that experience, I tried very hard to avoid gift exchanges with people who put very little effort into finding a good gift.  And for the ones in which I did participate, I certainly never indicated that just any book was an acceptable gift.

My reading will continue this year.  Of course it will, a day without a book in it is a wasted day.  And I debated resetting my goal in keeping with my reading rate already this year, but I decided that I do not want to challenge myself with something that would disappoint me or make me feel a failure if things happen and I cannot meet it by December 31.  I decided instead to just keep reading as I have been all year and seeing how many books I can read.  Hang around for my results -- I’ll keep the Adventures to Savour running tally updated.