Tag: reading

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reading

Reading Goals 2013

Every year I tweak my goals a bit – we’ve have 25 books, 6000 pages 2010 and 2011 and RED –  and this year will be no different. Except perhaps that it’s more than “tweak”.

This year I do have a number of goals but I also have a guiding principle and I’ve decided that my goals are all things to aim (note the “try to”s below) for but the guiding principle is what over-rules everything. So here goes…

Goals

  1. Try to read 40 books this year. 50 was a stretch but I managed 34. 40 will be another stretch but doable I hope.
  2. Try to reduce my To-Be-Read (TBR) list by 16. It’s currently at 251 so that will make a nice round 235.
  3. Try to finish all the books I start. May be harder and this goal is likely to be most in conflict with my Guiding Principle.
  4. Try to reduce my Goodreads “Currently Reading” shelf to 1 (or 2,3… if I’m genuinely reading them at the same time). Ever since I started using Goodreads I haven’t taken a book off my CR shelf unless I put it there in error or I finished reading it. This includes books I started, stalled on and later re-started from scratch. So essentially this boils down to “finish/re-read books I previously started”.

Those are the goals and the only goals. No page-counts, genres or other factors involved.

The Guiding Principle

In pursuing these goals I will abide by the following principle, especially when taking action which may appear to conflict with one of the goals (like abandoning a book, or increasing my TBR):

Reading is supposed to be fun, try to enjoy it.

Taking it a Step Further

Thinking about the Guiding Principle has made me wonder about being even more radical. Let’s just review how we got here.

This all started really because of  Harry Potter. Remember “Am I Crazy”? I wanted to re-read all the HP books before the new one came out. The need/desire to figure out if I was on track gave birth to my first tracking spreadsheet – crude and simplistic compared to what was to come. The next significant event was in 2009 when I realised that I’d only read 4 books in the whole of 2008. So “25 Books” was born and an improved version of the spreadsheet was created.

As 25 Books turned into 6000 pages I found that I needed/wanted a better spreadsheet to track what I was reading. This is essentially what I still use today, although even in the last couple of days I’ve been improving it further.

Now let’s be honest, there’s a geeky pleasure in the tracking itself. I like setting up the spreadsheets. I like watching the effect as I record time spent reading, comparing my pg/hr rate for my current book to previous ones or the overall average, working out roughly how long it will take to get to the next chapter, or next book, how far behind target I am and so on. All this is its own kind of fun but it’s not really about reading. Worse it’s possible it even detracts from or is displacement for actual reading.

It’s odd to think – it’s become so normal for me – but for the last four years whenever I’ve picked up a book to read I’ve also been making a note of how long I read for and how many pages I read. It’s not that big of an overhead and since I mainly read ebooks any device I’m reading on is automatically also a device I can record this info on. But the fact is that it doesn’t have that sense of just picking up and starting to read and maybe, just maybe it’s one of those barriers to entry that I was talking about in a previous post.

So here’s the idea: maybe I’ll give up the spreadsheet this year. I’ll still keep a note of which books I read, and I’ll certainly put up reviews but I’ll pass on the slightly obsessive recording part.

At least that’s the idea. I’d be giving up the geeky fun part in the hope of getting something else in return. That something I guess would be a sense of it being a lighter, simpler fun activity rather than a chore or an assignment. But there’s a part of me that will miss using my shiny new spreadsheet.

So that’s what I’m thinking but I’m still not sure if I’ll do it. Ultimately having fun whilst reading is probably more about choosing the right books.

Categories
book reading

How to Waste The Rest of Your Life (not) Reading

or

Are ebook Samples really Useful?

Why Did I Do This?

One of the biggest problems with books these days – and I guess I really mean ebooks – is there’s just too much freaking choice. The rise of self-publishing is undoubtedly a good thing, it means that anyone and everyone can get their words online and into a form you can conveniently download onto your phone, tablet or ereader device. But not everyone and anyone can write, or has something interesting to say, or can use a spell-checker apparently. And that’s before we get into issues of taste and preference.

One of the tools that sites like Amazon use to counter this problem – along with ratings and reviews – is the availability of free samples. Basically every ebook available from Amazon also has a sample – usually the first chapter or so – that you can download for free. A try-before-you-buy option with no commitment. Good idea huh?

Yes. Well, I mean I think so in principle but I seem to almost never use them in practice. This post will be partly about why that is. Maybe.

However the thing that really inspired this post was when samples are used in the recurring arguments over the relative quality of indies versus trad-published books. This is a sub-section of an argument about quality and it basically says that even if there is a lot of unreadable junk out there it’s possible to find the “gems” by using, amongst other things, samples.

Let’s just say I’m sceptical about this – surely it simply takes too much time to read samples to use them as anything other than a final filter? But that’s a gut reaction. So I thought I’d test it. Sort of.

What did I do?

I decided to throw a few numbers together and see what came out.

On the 16th August 2012 I went to amazon.co.uk and I looked at the available fiction ebooks (I almost never read non-fiction). I read mostly from the following genres (Amazon’s categories) SciFi, Fantasy, Crime & Thrillers and Action & Adventure. I looked for a “comedy” category but although I found “humour” as a category for paper books I didn’t for the Kindle store. Also that included non-fiction humour – books of essays and memoirs and so on – which I’m less inclined to read.

Anyway here’s a list of how many titles there were:

Genre Total
Action & Adventure 38,375
Crime & Thrillers 74,605
Fantasy 38,790
SciFi 33,904
All four 185,674
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694
All Fiction 561,178

Clearly, even without further analysis that’s too many books. Fortunately Amazon gives me lots of ways to filter these. I can look at just the ones with a 4star or higher review average (I want to read the good ones right?), or the ones which came out in the last 30days (let’s assume I check regularly) or I could look at what’s about to come out. Or combine two or more of these.

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 38,375 4,508 1,435 70 70
Crime & Thrillers 74,605 12,987 3,035 509 250
Fantasy 38,790 6,383 1,813 178 136
SciFi 33,904 4,102 1,427 102 10
All four 185,674 27,980 7,710 859 466
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694 10,485 3,240 280 146
All Fiction 561,178 67,690 22,813 3,253 1,409

Now some of those numbers look less scary but what do they mean in terms of reading samples?

What did I assume?

I needed to make an mathematical model (i.e. a spreadsheet) and for that I need some generalisations or assumptions.

First let’s assume that it takes me on average 5mins to read a sample. Sample sizes vary but I am a slow reader so I think this is on the low end but that will favour the proposition that samples are a good way to filter.

So let’s plug that into our model and here’s the time taken to read all those samples:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 133d 5h55m 16d 15h40m 5d 23h35m 5h50m 5h50m
Crime & Thrillers 259d 1h05m 45d 2h15m 11d 12h55m 2d 18h25m 1d 20h50m
Fantasy 135d 16h20m 22d 3h55m 6d 7h05m 1d 14h15m 11h20m
SciFi 118d 17h20m 14d 5h50m 5d 5h22m 8h30m 50m
All four 645d 16h50m 97d 3h40m 27d 18h30m 3d 23h35m 2d 14h50m
SciFi/Fantasy 252d 9h50m 36d 9h45m 11d 6h00m 1d 23h20m 1d 12h10m
All Fiction 1949d 12h50m 235d 0h50m 79d 5h05m 11d 7h05m 5d 21h25m

Whoops! The power of multiplication has turned what had seemed reasonable book numbers into to unreasonable lengths of time. I’m clearly not going to spend days (or months, years!) reading samples to decide my next “full” book read. About the only thing that seems reasonable is 4star SciFi from the last 30 days.

How did I refine the model? (assumptions #2)

OK so I’ve got some numbers now but are they at all useful? Would any sane person really trying to read all the samples from a particular category? Probably not. We can refine the model with a couple of additional assumptions. Let’s say I go to Amazon and look at the list of my particular category – it shows me them in pages of 12 where I get the book covers, titles and authors. Probably what I would do is page through this list and click on a few likely looking ones and read the blurb and if that didn’t immediately disqualify itself I’d then download the sample.

So let’s assume it takes 5seconds to scan each page of 12 book titles and covers.

Let’s assume that for any list 10% are worth reading the blurb and that it takes 15seconds to skim-read the blurb.

Remember this is based on testing the idea that samples are actually the way to go so the blurb-reading is really to confirm that the cover/title has given the correct impression as regards genre and probable content.

Finally let’s assume that we commit to read the samples of half the ones where we read the blurb i.e. 5% of the list overall.

Plugging those numbers in to our new model the overall time take per list is:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 8d 12h19m 1d 21h11m 6h44m 19m 19m
Crime & Thrillers 15d 14h34m 3d 13h01m 1d 14h15m 2h23m 1d10m
Fantasy 8d 14h16m 1d 5h59m 8h31m 50m 38m
SciFi 7d 15h19m 1d 19h16m 6h42m 28m 2m
All four 36d 8h29m 5d 11h28m 2d 12h13m 4h02m 2h11m
SciFi/Fantasy 14d 5h35m 2d 1h16m 1d 15h13m 1h18m 41m
All Fiction 110d 21h01m 13d 6h04m 4d 11h12m 1d 15h17m 6h37m

Still a lot of large numbers there. I’m automatically rejecting anything over a day. However an hour and a half to check out upcoming SciFi/Fantasy seems doable, as does a couple of hours to review the 4star+ books in my favourite genres from the past 30 days.

So, whilst the numbers overall confirm my gut instinct, limit the scope a little and it may actually be a viable method.

Hold on a second your model is wrong because…

I can think of two main reasons someone may object to the way I’ve set this up:

  1. The numbers in your assumptions are wrong. Obviously it’s true that if we vary these numbers we can come out with different answers. All I can say is I think the assumptions are roughly true for me and I’ve tried to err on the side that would lessen time taken so that I’m giving sampling as a method a fair chance.
  2. In reality, no-one would do it that way. Clearly when you have a nice simple equation you can plug whatever numbers you like in and get the answer. A human being however would react differently given 10 books to sample rather than 10,000. In other words the assumptions don’t scale. I think this is true. I think that the larger the number of books you have the more you would want to use other filters first OR the more likely you are to simply bail out early i.e. read the first 25 samples say, and pick the best of those. However I think the numbers are still useful because they show the difficulty of getting your book read, based on sampling alone, if it’s lower down that list. Which I think just confirms what indie authors already know which is the importance of getting as may good reviews, ratings and getting as high up those popularity lists as possible.

Have I learnt anything?

I think so. I had assumed that if I wanted to find something new to read I should follow the usual routes – reviews from trusted sources and recommendations from family/friends – methods which haven’t changed since I started reading (well before the advent of ebooks). I hadn’t expected sampling would help because I hadn’t expected that the numbers would ever dip to low enough levels to be reasonable. Turns out that may not be true and scanning the latest 4star books in my chosen genres once a month for samples might be a worthwhile investment.

Or not. Because intellectually I can see the merit. Psychologically an hour reading samples when I could be reading my next book seems like an hour wasted.

Categories
reading

8 Hours of Pleasure

…or More Thoughts on Reading

So I’ve just finished another book but rather than write it up straight away I wanted to post about something else, something related to reading itself.

I’ve noticed that I’ve developed something of an anxiety about what book to read next. This is partly because the choice is so potentially huge. Even amongst just the books I currently own and have never read I’ve probably got enough reading material for a few years at least.

M. tells me that in one of the Discworld books I’ve not read yet a child is placed in a room with every kind of sweet imaginable, and the child is in danger of starving because he can’t choose knowing that once he chooses one he’ll exclude all the others he could have chosen. It’s a bit like that.

My answer to this has been to try to plan to read more frequently and therefore more quickly, so that if I do start to read the “wrong” book I’ll be through it and on to the next in a week or so. I’m already thinking that “6000 Pages 2012” might be something along the lines of “Read Every Day” instead of its current form (though I’d hate not to be able to compare my stats).

It hit me that the way I read now is sort of predicated on having to “get through” a book, more than likely on the expectation that I’ll not enjoy it but that I’ll get the satisfaction of adding to my pagecount, days read etc on my spreadsheet. I find myself thinking “I want to finish this current book so I can move on to the next book” and feeling frustrated that a book takes so long to complete (around 8 hours reading time for me for a 400page book).

Then it occurred to me that I didn’t always think this way. OK, I always did a little. I used to be much more anal about not abandoning books even though I wasn’t enjoying them. However it struck me that rather than see it as 8 hours of “work” I have to complete to get to the next book I should view it as 8 hours of pleasure. That I should be torn between wanting to read more because I’m loving it and holding back because I don’t want to finish too soon and have the experience be over.

Of course that partly depends on the books I read being good – which is where we came in – but actually unless I’m being dishonest with myself they aren’t that bad (average rating 7.4 so far this year).

So, and I’m thinking as I write, I think I need to read more frequently, in smaller chunks and be more ready to give up on a “bad” book (after giving it a decent chance). I wonder if part of that would be to abandon the whole spreadsheet approach altogether – now there’s a scary thought!

Categories
reading

Why I Don’t Love Books (But Really I Do)

This post was going to be called “Why I Love My Kindle” until I realised I was really reacting against why some other people don’t like eReaders.

First I have to say that between the time I first blogged about it and gave it a lack-lustre 7/10[1], I have upgraded my original Kindle 2i to a Kindle 3. I’ve had this for a while now (a year?) and the differences – mostly the increased contrast of the eInk, partly the better software – have turned it from a nice gadget to something I love. In fact of the last (…counts) 12 books I read only one was on paper, and that was back in April. Of the last 26, 8 were paper and 18 were ebooks. Of those 18, 8 I had in both formats but chose to read the ebook. Prior to that they were all paper books.

Anyway, enough stats. I like reading on my Kindle, you get that. And the reasons are all the ones that you’ve heard before, basically the practical convenience issues –

  • hundreds of books in a single small object.
  • I can browse, sample and buy online via the Kindle itself
  • it remembers where I left off
  • searchability – this is huge for me, if I haven’t read a book for a few days I often need to flick back to remind myself of an incident or character, being able to search for it is brilliant.

Now of course there are downsides too, and I’ll come to those, but for me the advantages out weigh those hugely.

What I’ve found when discussing this with folks that don’t like Kindles/eReaders (or the idea of them) is that the reasons that emerge often aren’t anything to do with reading per se. Some of you will want to disagree with that statement but read on.

It’s like when cassettes and then CDs supplanted the vinyl record. These things won out (and are themselves replaced largely now by mp3s and streaming services) because of the convenience, the usability. Purists would argue that the sound was inferior but the vast majority of us just liked the fact that you could skip to any track quickly and easily.

It’s like that but different – because ebooks contain the same exact content as their paper counter-parts[2] – Great Expectations on the Kindle has the same words and sentences as it does in the most beautifully bound leather edition. So unlike Vinyl → CD where you give up some quality for convenience, here they are the same.

So the actual content, the stuff you read, is the same. What’s different? What do the non-Kindle-lovers miss?

Well there are still some practical things:

  • you can’t pass on a book easily. In fact you can’t lend, give or sell it to anyone who doesn’t have an ereader (unless you’re prepared to print it out) at all and for those that do you’ll probably be doing something illegal if you were to make a copy for them.
  • You can’t read it in the bath or other place where you’re worried about it being damaged. They’re a lot cheaper than they were but eReaders are still more expensive in themselves than a single paperback.

That’s really all I can think of on the “practical” front. Both are reasonable. Personally I don’t lend out a lot of books though I sometimes miss the ability to pass on a favourite to someone (although it also stops me doing that thing where you try to push a book you loved on someone only to have them dismiss it politely with ‘it was ok…’, or worse find they never read it). I have read in the bath but I find my arms start to ache and/or itch after a few minutes, so it’s not something I really do any more. For other venues well, they really are quite robust and direct sunlight is not an issue (makes it more readable and if anything less glare than the white of a paper book). Get a good cover and you’ll be fine.

The other reasons I’ve had cited are things like the following:

  • the feel of books, the tactile experience of turning the pages.
  • The way books look, especially well-produced hard-back ones
  • the way they look in shelves in a room
  • the smell

These are all real reasons people have given me. What I realised was that whilst I love books, I love them for what’s inside – the words, the ideas, the stories. These people as well as that, love books as objects. Now in many cases I expect that the object-love grows out of the associations, that the sense memory of feeling the paper under your fingers as you stroke it to pick up the page and turn it over with that dry smell of ‘book’ has become wedded to the joy of discovery of characters and worlds and horizons of others’ imaginations.

This is all good and I understand it, I have objects around my home that I love for reasons that have little to do with their “real” purpose, that may never even get used for that – but for the most part I don’t share this when it comes to books. I don’t love books as objects, I love them as the keepers of stories, places I can go in my head when I want to escape the hum-drum or the awful of this world.

A great book can take me away regardless of the physical attributes of its encasing, in fact to be great for me it must. It ought to be able to transcend the reality of this world, including its own physical “wrapper”. If to lose myself in a story the “box” it comes in has to be a particular quality then I’m probably doomed to few such experiences – fortunately that’s not the case.

At least for me.

[1] OK, so I wrote this from memory and as you can see I actually gave it 8/10 – which is pretty good. But my comments are far from a full-throated approval, which is why I think I remembered it as “lack-lustre”. I think that disparity shows I wanted to love it, and by the time I got my Kindle 3 I did.
[2] I confess I’m talking mainly about books without illustrations or pictures, which shows the bias of my reading preferences.
Categories
6000 pages reading

6000 Pages – 2010 Results

So here are the results for the 2010 “6000 Pages” project. I’m referring to it that way because I intend to do it again in 2011 with pretty much the same rules. First a couple of things I need to clarify before I can get on to the fun part – the numbers.

High Fidelity was the last book I completed in 2010 but the rules allowed me to count one book that I was part way through. In fact I was part way through 8 books so I really need to pick one as the one that “counts”. I had not expected for this to be the case but I guess the freedom of starting a new book instead of struggling on with something I wasn’t getting into was too much. However as I re-read the rules from the beginning of the year I see

Only one unfinished book counts. I expect this to be the last one. It means I don’t have to race to finish whatever I happen to be in the middle of on 31-dec (unless I want to)

So the intent was not simply to count an unfinished book to gain extra points, but to count a book I was going to finish anyway. This being the case I’m going to pick not the unfinished book with the highest page count (The Illearth War) but one I intend to finish in 2011 (Solar).

“Some Numbers”
2009 2010
Total reading time 98:23:00 107:38:00
Mins per/day 16 17
Pages/hour 50 51
Pages read 4924 5357
Pages read that count 4924 5050
Pages/day 13 15
Books completed 18 14
Average book length 274 352
One book every … days 20.25 26
Reading days 71 85
Time/reading day 01:23:00 01:15:00
Pages/reading day 69 64.9
Longest gap 54 45
Average rating for book 7 7.6

So you can see that by most measures I did better this year than last – I read more often, read more pages (if not more books), the gaps between reading days were short and spent more time reading.  I enjoyed it more too – which is true both from my overall impressions and from the fact that my average rating has gone up. So I must have scored more points right?

Er not quite.

The scoring rules are quite simple. First we take my “pages that count” score and each 100 pages above/below scores/deducts a point. Well I read 5050 pages so rounding up I can give myself 1 point.

Second take the number of reading days and compare to 85. In fact I read on 85 days so 0 points either added or deducted.

Then I get points for average book length. 352 is in the range 326-375 so I score 2 points.

Giving me an overall score of 3. Which doesn’t compare too well with last year’s 17 for “25 books”.

But hang on I said

the new scoring rules […] are designed to give me a stretch, to hopefully allow a similar score to last year for a similar amount of effort (so I can aim to ‘beat’ my score, even if the basis is entirely different)

and yet my “similar” but slightly better efforts (as shown in the table) give me significantly less. I can only conclude that despite my stated intent I miscalculated. I am therefore retroactively changing the rules so that I start with a “base” of 15 points. That seems reasonable given that I can potentially lose points for all three of the main criteria. And 15 seems fair because it gives me an overall score of 18points – which means I “beat” last year’s score but only by 1 point, which seems to reflect what’s shown by the more detailed figures.

Slightly Revised Rules

So, mainly for clarity, here are the rules for 2011.

1. Start with 15 points

2. For every 100 pages above/below 5000 add/deduct a point. Round up if 50 or above and down if below.

3. For every “reading day” above or below 85 add or deduct 1 point – upto a maximum of +15 or minimum of -10.

4. Round up the average page count to the nearest 5 and:

  • 0-250pages – -1 point
  • 251-300pages – 0 points
  • 301-325pages – 1 point
  • 326-375pages – 2points
  • 375-500pages – 5points
  • 500+pages – 10points

5. Only one unfinished book counts. This book must be finished the following year. Deduct 1 point if the previous year’s unfinished book is not complete.

Categories
6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages, One Day – David Nicholls (pages 1027-1474)

One Day - David Nicholls

When I first started doing reviews on this blog I decided that unless something was very new I wouldn’t constrain myself to not revealing spoilers. However up until now I don’t think I’ve given away anything.

Up until now because I don’t really feel I can talk about One Day by David Nicholls, and the impact it had on me, without talking about the ending. Just in case there is anyone out there who has alighted on this review and doesn’t want to be spoiled I’ll be using the WordPress click-here-for-more thingy.

So anyway – here goes.

I first came into contact with David Nicholls work when I saw the movie Starter for Ten which is based on his book of the same name. I enjoyed the movie – it’s a comedy of love, romance and University Challenge set in the 80s – but never read the book. However when I saw this book in the bookshop I was intrigued and so bought it (although I got the ebook version for my Kindle).

It’s about the relationship between two friends – starting as they’re just leaving Uni in 1988 – told in a series of chapters that take place on the same day of consecutive years. This is a device that works well I think. It gives a structure to the book even if it then feels a little episodic. But like the episodes of a good TV show they have their own stories, things to enjoy, whilst developing on-going plotlines and characters. There’s a sense in which you see these two people grow up and mature. If that sounds a little dull it’s not. I found it both funny and touching – but then (as has been mentioned before) I’m at the right stage of life to be considering things like how my life has developed so far.

If I have criticisms it’s when the current episode isn’t as funny/moving/interesting in and of itself. That may be a sense of humour thing. This could be another of those comedies I like but don’t laugh at.

The characters are likeable – surprisingly so in one case. I felt my sympathy more with Emma, the female main character, rather than Dexter. But Dexter does some terrible things and you still like him – which is how he’s supposed to be.

I dithered about what to score it. On Goodreads I gave it 4/5 stars so I guess it should be 7 or 8. I’m giving it a reluctant 8.

8/10 – might have been higher but for… well see below if you don’t mind being spoiled.

Pages read so far: 1592

Pages in completed books: 1474

Continue reading “6000 Pages, One Day – David Nicholls (pages 1027-1474)”
Categories
6000 pages reading

6000 Pages

Something a little more positive.

Up until a couple of days ago I was all set to launch “20 books”. This was to reflect a change in priorities of my reading goals. As I said in the wrap-up of 25 books, last year I wanted to read more widely – hence different genres, authors and so on. This year I mainly want to concentrate on reading a little more, and spreading it out a little more. My idea was to have a target of 20 books but with points for longer books so that overall I read more.

Whilst I was considering writing this up, I realised that a better way to do this is to set the goal for the number of pages. Last year I read just under 5000 pages, so let’s aim for 6000. The reason this is better is also partly to do with my spreadsheet. My 25 books spreadsheet (as well as the 20 books one I had begun) is based on the one I created a couple of years ago for my Harry Potter marathon. I had in effect merely expanded the number of books and the time period. But that was for a specific goal – to read all books by a particular date. It was therefore a good thing to be able to see what page of what book I should be on and how close to that I was.

But applying that to a whole year didn’t work as well. It meant that at any one time I could only really have one book on the go. I had no way of counting reading time for a book I set aside and then later finished. Also once I was reasonably far behind (as I soon was) the ‘target’ figures became meaningless in terms of motivation. Knowing I should be 4 books ahead of where I was it didn’t make much odds which page I was on!(1)

But by making it about pages – and designing a new spreadsheet accordingly – I can count all my reading. I can have more than one book on the go at once(2). I can monitor my targets in terms of pages read, pages/day, days read etc. It’s also much simpler.

The New Rules

So here’s the new scoring rules. They are designed to give me a stretch, to hopefully allow a similar score to last year for a similar amount of effort (so I can aim to ‘beat’ my score, even if the basis is entirely different) and they are aimed at the underlying goals of reading more and more often.

1. Page count – my goal is 6000 pages but my benchmark is 5000, just above last year’s. For every 100 pages above or below 5000 add or deduct 1 point.

2. Days read – last year I managed 71 days. Adding a fortnight to that makes a nice round 85. For every day above or below 85 add or deduct 1 point – upto a maximum of +15 or minimum of -10.

3. Book length – last year my average book was 274pages. I always felt like I was looking for short books that I could finish quickly. That felt a little like cheating. So this year I can gain points for reading longer books. Round up the average page count to the nearest 5 and:

  • 0-250pages – -1 point
  • 251-300pages – 0 points
  • 301-325pages – 1 point
  • 326-375pages – 2points
  • 375-500pages – 5points
  • 500+pages – 10points

Knowing how a few low scores bring an average down(3) I suspect I’ll find it hard to get more than 2 points – but that’s ok.

4. Only one unfinished book counts. I expect this to be the last one. It means I don’t have to race to finish whatever I happen to be in the middle of on 31-dec (unless I want to)

Not really a scoring rule, but a goal is to not get more than 1 book behind on writing them up in the blog. So before starting book 5 for example I really ought to have written up book 3. I use the example of 5 and 3 because I am on book 3 and haven’t written up book 1 yet – but hopefully I’ll put that right tomorrow.

(1) Actually this was a little bit of a problem with the Harry Potter books too. If you remember I wanted to finish book 5 before the movie came out and that meant I needed to be well ahead of where the targets otherwise said I should be

(2) I don’t generally like to do this anyway but it’s surprising how many times I would have liked the flexibility.

(3) Whenever I make the 275mile trip back to my parents, I usually entertain myself by keeping track of my average speed. The journey is 10 miles of town traffic with the rest on the motorways. I’m always amazed by how long you have to go at 80 to raise the average speed to something decent when it’s been affected by the initial stretch (averaging 10-15)

Categories
25 books reading reviews

25 Books – 18 is *nearly* 25 right?

So this is the official “25 books“ 2009 wrap-up post. I nearly wrote it last night but in the end I only had time to collate the stats and work out the points. But we’ll get to that.

As you can see from the title the magic number was 18. I read 18 books in 2009. Not quite 25. Not even 20. But still quite a few more than I would have read and therefore an achievement. Instead of a book every two weeks I read one every three (roughly, on average).

Some Numbers

So since we’re talking numbers let’s do the stats thing. No point in keeping complicated spreadsheets and not doing the stats thing right? In 2009…

  • I read for a total of 98 hours and 23mins, or 16mins a day
  • My reading speed was 50pages/hour
  • I read a total of 4924 pages, or 13 pages a day
  • Since I read 18 books this means the books had an average of 274 pages each
  • I read one book every 20 1/4 days on average but…
  • I only read on 71 out of the 365 days meaning that…
  • I averaged 1hour 23mins on days I actually read
  • I read an average of 69 pages on those days
  • There were long gaps between bouts of reading. The longest was 54days. The next three longest were 40, 35 and 35 days respectively. So there really were isolated but intense periods of lots reading and literally weeks of not.

Enough Numbers What Have You Learnt?

Patience. How about I tell you about how well I did with regard to the “rules” of the challenge? You know the points?

Fair Enough – So How Did You Score?

Here’s those rules:

“1. Read at least 25 books before the end of 2009”

I read 18 books.

“2. No more than 3 (of the 25) can be books you’ve read before. If you read more than 25 can you re-read others.”

I didn’t re-read any books.

“3. You should read at least 3 books by authors you’ve not read before.”

Of the 18, 12 were by authors I’d never read before – Richard Matheson (I am Legend), David Almond (Skellig), W.E.Bowman (Rum Doodle), Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby), Brian Aldiss (Hothouse),Cally Taylor (Heaven Can Wait), J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), John Lindqvist (Let the Right One In), (Beowulf), David Peace (1974), Paul Torday (Girl on the Landing)

“4. This should include at least 2 new authors (i.e. not just 3 books by 1 new author)”

See above

“5. At least one book must have been published (for the first time) in 2009”

Heaven Can Wait, Juliet Naked and Girl on the Landing were all new in 2009.

“6. For each of the targets 1-5 deduct a point if you miss it.”

Even though I only read 18 books that’s only one target missed so

-1

“7. If you read a book from a genre you’ve never read before add a point”

I read Horror, Travel Parody, Literary Fiction, Chick Lit., Crime/Thriller, Espionage. That’s six

+6 = 5

“8. If you read a book that you wouldn’t have read but for a recommendation add a point.”

My sister recommended Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I bought and read Skellig because it was on a display advertised as “recommended by Nick Hornby”. Rum Doodle was a secret santa present I wouldn’t have bought for myself.

+3 = 8

“9. If you read a book that can only be bought second-hand add a point.”

Hothouse is out of print.

+1 = 9

“10. If you read a book first published more than 50 years ago and still in print add a point. For books first published more than 200years ago add 2 points. For books published more than 500 years add 3 points and for books written over 1000years ago add 4 point.”

Beowulf dates from somewhere between the 8th and early 11th century. 1026 is the latest date associated with the manuscripts. I’m going to go with the probabilities and call it a 1000+ book.

+4 = 13

I had no 500+ or 200+ books. (Though I would have had if I hadn’t set aside Persuasion) but I had 4 50+ ones – Great Gatsby, I am Legend, Rum Doodle and Catcher in the Rye.

+1 (x4) = 17

So I scored 17points. Which is a fairly meaningless number without something to compare it to.

Speaking of Scores…

Almost forgot, the average score a book received was 7.0 – which means I basically enjoyed most of the books. That’s a little higher than I expected. I guess I remember the few low scoring ones.

So Any Conclusions?

I’ve learnt that given where I am right now, it makes more sense to read stuff I know I’ll enjoy rather than try to force myself to expand my horizons too much. Having said that I also learn that I enjoy genres I didn’t think I would like crime and horror. I also learnt that I tend to read a lot in little bursts – a few hours a day for a few days. I’d like to spread that out a little but honestly I think some of that coms from the way reading works – if you get into a good book you want to read it more.

All in all I feel pleased. By setting myself targets I read more that I would otherwise I and enjoyed most of what I read. I also read things I might not have considered.

I was going to wrap this up by setting out goals for 2010 (no, they’re not the same) but this post is long enough already.

Categories
25 books reading

A Pause for Thought about Reading, OR Why I’m not Reading Middlemarch (yet!)

I bought 3 new books today. This post will be about why and what they were.

Reasons to Read

I’m halfway through my 25 books project – in terms of books, obviously not time – being in the middle of book 13, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on progress. I’ve been wondering why exactly I’m doing this. Reading should be about pleasure shouldn’t it? I seem to have found a way to make it a chore. Also it seems to have become more important that I achieve my 25 books target (which I’m not doing anyway) than to enjoy what I’m reading. All that “I just wanna be someone who reads (again)” stuff probably has more to do with middle-age crisis and yearning for youth than actually what books I choose and whether I enjoy them.

So I’ve sort of come to a conclusion: I should read books I like. Well d’uh, who knew eh? But how do you know what’ll you’ll like before you read it?

So what are things that make me want to keep reading:

  • I want to find out what happens
  • I want to spend more time with interesting, entertaining characters
  • I want to be taken away to a different world
  • I want to update my spreadsheet and see the page-count go up

One that’s missing from there is that “I enjoy language itself”. Now it may be true that I am capable of appreciating the beauty of a well constructed sentence, though I do sometime doubt it, it’s not really on my reasons for reading. It’s not why I turn to a book in the first place.

What Should I Read?

Or, as I said, how do I know what I will like? I’ve said I should read things I like and on realising this I decided to change my remaining 25 books list. I quickly found that once I weeded out the books that I wanted to read simply to be “better read” then I actually didn’t have quite enough books I want to read. So I felt a trip to the bookshop was in order, but what to buy?

Well one approach is to stick with authors or a genre you know and have loved in the past. Which is why I read so many Terry Pratchett and Larry Niven novels in my 20s. But my tastes have changed. I don’t now approach those books with the same sense that I am guaranteed a good time that I once did.

Another approach is to go for books which other people tell you are good – whether it’s friends and family or celebrity book clubs or serious literary prizes. This can work but my experience so far is that you have to be quite canny to choose a subset of such books that pique your interests for other reasons anyway. Both the books I’ve officially set aside, The Crow Road and The Book Thief, as well as severall that have dropped off my list fall into this category.

Another approach is to go for ‘classics’ – if they’re still being read after X years they must have something to them. True and both the classics I have read so far have much to commend them but I haven’t been blown away by either. An unrepresentative sample perhaps.

And the Winners are…

So you’ll be dying to know by now what the 3 new books are:

Fire by Kristin Cashore – its fantasy which is a genre I like, it has an intriguing premise and a review I read got me interested.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan – I realised that I’d enjoyed both books I’d read by him so why not try another?

1974 by David Peace – good/popular enough to be adapted into an acclaimed ITV drama series. It’s a crime thriller, which is not my usual genre of choice, but I suspect it will be a page-turner.

 

Categories
25 books reading

25 Books, Book 12, Catcher in the Rye

Holden Caulfield.

Holden Caulfield!

What can you say about Holden Caulfield? He’s kind of annoying and yet strangely endearing. He has this breathless energy and an utter inability to stick to the point that means that he’ll tell you his life story, about a couple books he’s read and incidents about people he knows – with a few tall tales thrown in – all in response to “Hello” and before you’ve had a chance to blink. He has this kind of vulnerability and superficial optimism that carries him through though I guess.

I suppose I’d’ve appreciated him more when I was nearer his age. I read somewhere recently that there are some books, films etc that if you don’t catch when you’re young enough then it’s sort of too late. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I was wrong-footed by the vague impressions I’d picked up or just the fact that this was supposed to be a great book. I can see how in a world that didn’t have a lot of time for, care or know much about teenagers, and ditto but even less so for/about mental illness – then a sympathetic first-person account of someone like Holden would seem shocking and new. As it is, well it’s sad and touching but not shocking.

It’s odd but I was a little bored by him during the time we spent together, but now, as the memory softens, I find myself thinking kindly of him. Glad to have met him, not sure if I want to spend a lot more time with him. Like I said, annoying but strangely endearing.

7/10 – nice bloke, rambles on a bit.