Most years I set myself a reading goal. I keep track of the books I’d like to read in a spreadsheet, where I list the title, the author, the date I finished the book, and my rating (from 1 to 5). At the end of the year the books that I didn’t read roll over to next year’s list, while the books that I finished are removed to make room for new wanna-reads.
This year my goal is to read 24 books from the list of 60 or so on the spreadsheet. It’s a fairly modest goal. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I don’t want it to become a chore. I have a lot of work-related reading that I have to do and which can take up quite a bit of time, and quite often I’d just rather watch TV and let my brain coast for a while. Even though my reading goal is modest, I’ve noticed that as the end of the year approaches I usually have to resort to reading the shorter books on the list in order to achieve it. This means that the longer books on my list tend not to get read. Now I like reading Big Books; Big Books don’t intimidate me. Of my Top 10 Favorite Books of All Time, about half of them are books that I would consider to be Big Books. So it’s a little disheartening that my reading goals would actually work to discourage me from reading them.
One year I didn’t set myself a reading goal. The idea was that I would then be free to read some Big Books that would otherwise remain unread out of worry that I wouldn’t reach my goal. But the result that year was that I actually read quite a bit less than usual, and the Big Books remained unread anyway. Clearly, some sort of accounting must be made for me to see progress.
As of today (10 November 2021), I’ve read 23 books, so I’m on track to achieve my reading goal for the year — as long as I finish a book before 31 December. But again, I’ve neglected the Big Books on my list. I obviously need a different kind of accounting so that the Big Books get some readerly love. So here’s what I’m going to do next year. Last night, I found the page counts of all of the books that I’ve read this year and included them in my spreadsheet. I then totaled up the page counts (9434 pages) and divided that total by the number of books I’ve read so far (23). This gave me an average book length of 410.2 pages. So rounding down a bit, a book typical of the sort that I’m inclined to read is 400 pages long or so, and 25 of them comes to 10,000 pages. So instead of reading 24 (or 25 or 30 or 40) books next year, my goal will be to read 10,000 pages. I think 10,000 pages is an easily achievable goal.
Now you may be thinking that depending on the publisher, genre, layout, etc., a page can have a greatly varying number of words on it, and that page count isn’t really a good guide to how much one has actually read — word count is obviously the count that matters. And you would be right. But the number of pages is a better metric than the number of books; and until publishers start reporting word count as well as page count in the metadata observable on online bookstores and other book-related websites, word count isn’t really a practical metric. I mean, I suppose I could count the number of words on a typical page of a book I want to read (or several pages and take an average) and then do the math myself (number of words per page multiplied by the number of pages). But that’s more work than I want to put into it — I do have my TV shows to keep up with, after all.
