Reading challenge for 2020?? Exact challenge tbd.

[sarasa_cat]

I need a book reading challenge for 2020.

I need to return to regularly scheduled fiction reading.

Being mostly off the grid for a week taught me something about my bad habit of defaulting to crap reading on my phone: dwelling amongst low hanging fruit across various newspapers for far too long, daily. And the endless scroll on Instagram and tumblr, which can all mask itself as being more useful than it is regarding time spent.

READING CHALLENGE:

I don’t want to commit to something like “52 books in one year” bc I feel the need to have flexibility for:
- abandoning books that aren’t worth more time
- reading lots of short fiction
- reading a few epic length mega-sized novels
- allow fanfic to count too, dammit

I might instead aim for something like “read x pages/words of fiction per week.” Haven’t determined a value for x yet.

Or read for y minutes daily (or weekly).

And record all fiction I read in a spreadsheet.

No matter, this post is my declaration that It Will Be Attempted.

Anyone know of good reading challenge communities?

Comments

[thehungrycity]

I don't know of any reading challenge communities, and I'm focusing on academic reading rather than fiction, but I've been contemplating some of the same flexibility issues. I'm currently trialing a reading log that I made for myself in Excel, after finding myself dissatisfied with what I found online from a Google search.

My answers for the flexibility so far are....

- To count something as 'read' I only need to read the introduction and conclusion (and abstract, if it has one). At that point I'm free to decide that it's not worth my time to continue, and it still 'counts' on my reading log.

- My log records both the type of thing I'm reading (article, book chapter, book, etc) and the reason I'm reading it (recent research/old research I missed/classic stuff). I've set up a couple of pivot table to break down what I'm reading (type and reason) by month, so that I can see how I'm going and if I want to I can decide to read something different based on that information. My aim however, is to have a mix.

Because I don't use the Excel spreadsheet as my reference manager, I haven't split apart the reference into separate columns for author, date, title, etc. I just have one column for 'bibliographic reference' with the full details, along with another column noting whether I bothered to log it in my reference manager (only those things that are worth my time make it into my reference manager). But EVERYTHING I read is in this reading log.

I'm aiming to read two recent articles and one older piece of research from my backlog every day. Books will obviously take longer.

So far it's going well... may very well carry this into the new year. :)

[sarasa_cat]

Ah... your spreadsheet brings back memories. It also made me realize that I need to create a professional reading log (research, etc.). And the act of typing that sentence made me realize that I would benefit from logging EVERYTHING I read (within reason). Ahahhahahaha.

Total agreement on academic papers being counted as read based on the abstract, intro, conclusion, and a very quick skim of the rest of it.

Thinking about how I can create a reading log that is an “everything log” and then use pivot tables and/or filters to create views that limit by certain criteria, show trends, etc. Hm. So much food for thought.