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Reading Goal Pre-retrospective
Oct. 25th, 2013 07:35 amI just realized I'm only six books shy of my Goodreads reading goal for the year.
Which sounds awesome (yay for nearly finishing two months early!)...until I remember that I made my goal 100 books, or just slightly under two books a week. Which I'm well on track to beat. Which...perhaps says less-than-flattering things about how much actual useful stuff I've done this year. (In all fairness, some of the tally are short stories that GR still counts as "books", or omnibus editions where I can count the omnibus itself as well as each individual volume. And a number were audiobooks, where I was likely doing something useful while listening. But not the majority, I don't think.)
I set the count so high at the beginning of the year as an aspirational sort of thing, largely in hopes of giving myself something to focus on aside from Facebook/Cracked/Slate. In that sense, it's been...moderately successful. There've been times when I meant to sit down and read and ended up sucked into the Internet, true, but also more times than I can count where I consciously chose to leave the computer closed and read instead. And I think that's definitely contributed to a certain broadening of my reading horizons - I intentionally sought out some nonfiction and other genres I've traditionally avoided (reading The Devil in the White City has certainly contributed to my understanding/enjoyment of Chicago history), and got a chance to explore some other authors who were new to me but are now part of my canon of favorites (Lois McMaster Bujold and John Green both come to mind). So overall I don't think the project's been a failure.
The thing is, most people who embark on projects like this do so to broaden their horizons - change their worldview, that sort of thing. I didn't have any real expectations of that, but even so, I've been reading more-or-less constantly since I was four years old. So this wasn't exactly a challenge, or even much of a change; mostly just a shifting-around of time from one pursuit to another. And while reading something new is arguably better for your mental health than obsessing over Facebook, I'm not sure how much better a person it's made me, as it were. I feel like I've reached my goal - yay! - but I set the bar pretty low to begin with, so maybe it's not as worth celebrating as I thought it might be. As Cracked guru David Wong put it so brilliantly, "How much time do you spend producing media, and how much time do you spend consuming media produced by others? Because only one of those contributes to your value as a human being." Perhaps a better goal for the upcoming year would be more along the lines of "minimize Facebook time by searching out social/theatrical/musical/volunteering opportunities".
Still, at the very least, it's broken me of the habit of opening up the computer as a default time-filler, without first thinking "is there something else more useful I could be doing?". And maybe I'll try doing NNWM again this year. I've done it two years now, and there was a definite jump in quality the second year. And it's not like I don't have lots of time for outlining over this next week. Plus Brian has a great idea for a pulp story called "Veronica and the Pandas from Mars". Maybe we could be writing buddies again.
Which sounds awesome (yay for nearly finishing two months early!)...until I remember that I made my goal 100 books, or just slightly under two books a week. Which I'm well on track to beat. Which...perhaps says less-than-flattering things about how much actual useful stuff I've done this year. (In all fairness, some of the tally are short stories that GR still counts as "books", or omnibus editions where I can count the omnibus itself as well as each individual volume. And a number were audiobooks, where I was likely doing something useful while listening. But not the majority, I don't think.)
I set the count so high at the beginning of the year as an aspirational sort of thing, largely in hopes of giving myself something to focus on aside from Facebook/Cracked/Slate. In that sense, it's been...moderately successful. There've been times when I meant to sit down and read and ended up sucked into the Internet, true, but also more times than I can count where I consciously chose to leave the computer closed and read instead. And I think that's definitely contributed to a certain broadening of my reading horizons - I intentionally sought out some nonfiction and other genres I've traditionally avoided (reading The Devil in the White City has certainly contributed to my understanding/enjoyment of Chicago history), and got a chance to explore some other authors who were new to me but are now part of my canon of favorites (Lois McMaster Bujold and John Green both come to mind). So overall I don't think the project's been a failure.
The thing is, most people who embark on projects like this do so to broaden their horizons - change their worldview, that sort of thing. I didn't have any real expectations of that, but even so, I've been reading more-or-less constantly since I was four years old. So this wasn't exactly a challenge, or even much of a change; mostly just a shifting-around of time from one pursuit to another. And while reading something new is arguably better for your mental health than obsessing over Facebook, I'm not sure how much better a person it's made me, as it were. I feel like I've reached my goal - yay! - but I set the bar pretty low to begin with, so maybe it's not as worth celebrating as I thought it might be. As Cracked guru David Wong put it so brilliantly, "How much time do you spend producing media, and how much time do you spend consuming media produced by others? Because only one of those contributes to your value as a human being." Perhaps a better goal for the upcoming year would be more along the lines of "minimize Facebook time by searching out social/theatrical/musical/volunteering opportunities".
Still, at the very least, it's broken me of the habit of opening up the computer as a default time-filler, without first thinking "is there something else more useful I could be doing?". And maybe I'll try doing NNWM again this year. I've done it two years now, and there was a definite jump in quality the second year. And it's not like I don't have lots of time for outlining over this next week. Plus Brian has a great idea for a pulp story called "Veronica and the Pandas from Mars". Maybe we could be writing buddies again.
