50 book challengers: how did you do?

Eliot Rosewater

As 2009 draws to a close so presumably do the 50 book challenges of many Boardsies. The goal, for those who dont know, is to read 50 books in 12 months. How did ye all fair?


I read just 50 myself, finishing with A Tale of Two Cities sometime in mid-December. Ive been caught up since with a rather long book which will put me at a disadvantage for next years

And a very special mention to lemon_sherbert who read no less than 100 books in 2009

Denerick

This would have been interesting if I had of kept a log last year. I'd say I'm between 45-55, I can't really remember. I tend to read bunches of chapters in history books at different times so its hard to really count them (Hence the +- 5 points)

lemon_sherbert

Well this has been answered for me already, but yeah, I finished my 50 book challenge

Hester

I only managed 40. :pac:

I realised pretty quickly that I wouldn't finish it as I was working full time and going to college in the evening - I simply didn't have the time.

Also, I found that at the beginning I was becoming too focussed on getting to the end of the book, to tick another one off, that I wasn't enjoying the books as much as I would like. At that point, I stopped worrying about what number I was on and just enjoyed reading. I did continue to keep a log and I'll definitely keep that up as it's interesting to look back on.

Plowman

This post has been deleted.

Blush_01

55 in 2009.

Going to try to beat that, only read one full book in December.

Initially set a goal of 40, goal for 2010 stands at 56. Might be more difficult since I won't be taking the train or bus as much (passed my driving test in November).

Huge congrats to lemon_sherbert! That's no mean feat!

PurpleBee

since when did counting matter to reading?

Eliot Rosewater

Thats an important consideration, for sure. Some might consider the 50 book challenge stupid.

I suppose it does give one a goal to ascribe to, and make it easier to attain that goal. I don't think the quality of the reading goes down to be honest. It just makes one motivated to read more.

Denerick

PurpleBee wrote: »

since when did counting matter to reading?

It doesn't, but it is interesting to keep a log of what you're reading.

Some say that reading is to your mind what exercising is to your body. We have so many distractions in the modern world that oftentimes its difficult to find time uninterrupted to sit down and read books. If the 50 book challenge motivates people to read more, I can see no harm in it.

líreacán

I only got to 25

I started the challenge with the idea that having finished college, I would have a lot of spare time to read. As it turned out, I got a job two days having finishing my final exams, so my time was cut down drastically! Also, Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children took a lot of time to read, if I wasn't working towards the challenge, I would have given up after a few days!!! That's my excuse anyhow!!

Well done to all who attempted. Congratulations to all who completed. And WOW to Lemon Sherbert!!

Valmont

While I applaud the 50 book challenge, I would be reticent to congratulate someone for reading 100 books in a year. Unless they were all very short, most of them had to be rushed.

Eliot Rosewater

Valmont wrote: »

While I applaud the 50 book challenge, I would be reticent to congratulate someone for reading 100 books in a year. Unless they were all very short, most of them had to be rushed.

Anthony Burgess the renowned critic reviewed something like 350 novels in the space of a two year period for a newspaper.

I did the 50 book challenge, and Id be very surprised if I read more than 3/4 a day on average. 50 books isnt a whole lot over the space of 350 days really. My girlfriend generally reads a book in one morning, and she definitely doesn't rush.

lemon_sherbert

Valmont wrote: »

While I applaud the 50 book challenge, I would be reticent to congratulate someone for reading 100 books in a year. Unless they were all very short, most of them had to be rushed.

It certainly doesn't matter how many books you read in a year, as long as you are enjoying them, IMO. However, to say 100 books in a year must be rushed ignores that different people have different reading paces and dedicate different amounts of time to reading. I don't watch much TV and usually spend about 3/4 hours reading a day, more outside term-time, I'm lucky to have the time as a student. I don't expect congratulations, but nor do I like the assumption that I rushed through books in the attempt to stack up numbers. 100 books in a year isn't unusual for me, I just read as I ordinarily did. The only difference I think challenges like this make are that I tend to pick up another book straight away rather than leave days between reading.

Malari

I didn't do this challenge actually, but for the first time, wrote down all the titles I read in a year. I read at my normal pace, which is probably several hours a day. It came to 103 books! :eek:

I was surprised but it's interesting to see what you do in a year. I probably was doing even more in college, when I had to get through an enormous amount of background reading.

BossArky

2006: 53
2007: unsure - laptop crash ate excel log
2008: 26
2009: 26

I always aim for 52 books per year i.e. 1 a week. My time has been taken up with other things recently so my reading time is down a bit.

Valmont

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I don't think the quality of the reading goes down to be honest. It just makes one motivated to read more.

I fail to see how book length or complexity cannot be factors if one is doing the 50 book "challenge".

Surely books such as War and Peace or Atlas Shrugged would be pushed out of the way for more challenge friendly titles like the entire Harry Potter series.

I don't claim to know the reading habits of anyone here but I know that if I undertook a challenge to read as many books as I could in one year, the quality of literature would sharply drop, unquestionably.

Anyway, to each his own.

Denerick

Valmont wrote: »

I fail to see how book length or complexity cannot be factors if one is doing the 50 book "challenge".

Surely books such as War and Peace or Atlas Shrugged would be pushed out of the way for more challenge friendly titles like the entire Harry Potter series.

I don't claim to know the reading habits of anyone here but I know that if I undertook a challenge to read as many books as I could in one year, the quality of literature would sharply drop, unquestionably.

Anyway, to each his own.

Well, I do kind of agree with you on some level. If I really did take this on (And I'm not BTW, for some of the concerns you raise) I possibly would do something like that. Its a bit of a poisened chalice really, it interferes with your natural reading flow (In a bias towards shorter, less challenging reads) whilst also adding an impetus to read more. I think the 50 book challenge is excellent for people who find it hard to motivate themseleves to get reading. I don't particularly have this problem so I don't bother. But there is also the danger of analysing 'the challenge' too deeply. I'm sure most people don't think like this.

líreacán

Valmont wrote: »

Surely books such as War and Peace or Atlas Shrugged would be pushed out of the way for more challenge friendly titles like the entire Harry Potter series.
/QUOTE]


THAT'S where I went wrong when picking up Midnight's Children!!

For me, it was more about getting reading again, than how many books I got through. I like to work to deadlines and quotas, even though in this case I did not reach either, I still read mostly books I would have anyway, just maybe a little more determinedly!

Eliot Rosewater

Well thats a fair point Valmont. But it depends a lot on the reader. Im interested in reading lots of classics at the moment (will that ever change?). So I couldn't avoid long books at all. In the past year I read Fountainhead, Crime And Punishment, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Catch 22, For Whom the Bell Tolls ... all longish books. In the coming year Ill be reading two longish Huxley books (some two bit history student recommended them :P), Atlas Shrugged and am at the moment reading Earthly Powers that would be 800-1000 pages if in normal font.

/takes breath

Maybe thats just me. Reading classic books comes first, reading 50 books in a year second.

Blush_01

Well from my point of view:

I kept a reading log in 2009. My personal goal was 40 books for the year. When I hit 40 I just kept going. I'm not a particularly speedy reader, and I spend far too much time online doing nothing or watching tv for it to be healthy, so a challenge like the 40 that I set myself asked me to dedicate more time to reading than I had done in 4 years of university where I frankly only read the literature I needed for college and the secondary material. I was an avid reader in primary and secondary school, and for some reason I got very distracted in college.

I feel like this reading challenge got me heading back towards my old reading patterns. Yes, I'm going to push myself even further this year, and I deserve to do it for me. I could do with challenging myself with regard to what I read a bit more, and if it takes a challenge like this to make me, then I can't see the problem with it. The challenge is in reading what you'd normally read, not reading things you wouldn't look at ordinarily simply to get the tally up.

It's quite personal really, and the only one you cheat by reading below your normal standards is yourself. It doesn't hurt anyone else, but you lose the challenge - what's the point in that?

Malari

Valmont wrote: »

I fail to see how book length or complexity cannot be factors if one is doing the 50 book "challenge".

Surely books such as War and Peace or Atlas Shrugged would be pushed out of the way for more challenge friendly titles like the entire Harry Potter series.

I don't claim to know the reading habits of anyone here but I know that if I undertook a challenge to read as many books as I could in one year, the quality of literature would sharply drop, unquestionably.

Anyway, to each his own.

Yes, in a way, I think that would inevitably happen. In fact, I have quite a few short-ish books on my list, but I wouldn't necessarily say that they were of lower quality than the tomes you quote above. The reason I read several of them is that they were on a list of recommended classics.

But I also got through a lengthy biography on Chairman Mao Neither very high quality literature nor a page-turner! But it was interesting.

So while I'd like to get through as many books as I can, I've decided not to set a numerical challenge for myself in 2010 either. I just want to keep reading continuously and record what I've read. That's enough motivation for me.

Sinann

I like the idea of keeping a log of books read.
Think I'll do that this year, thanks.

Corkfeen

I read 40, slipped my mind to keep the list up to date.

sceptre

Valmont wrote: »

I fail to see how book length or complexity cannot be factors if one is doing the 50 book "challenge".

Surely books such as War and Peace or Atlas Shrugged would be pushed out of the way for more challenge friendly titles like the entire Harry Potter series.

I don't claim to know the reading habits of anyone here but I know that if I undertook a challenge to read as many books as I could in one year, the quality of literature would sharply drop, unquestionably.

Anyway, to each his own.

It's a personal challenge/target/<appropriate fluffy term>, not a group race:). Whatever suits people themselves. As part of the new year resolution of sorts, people are more likely to succeed (see half-way down this article) if it's an empirical & step by step target as well as if they tell others about it. Ideally suited for this then. And sometimes it's interesting. That's all really.

gaf1983

Think I hit the 34 mark myself. It wasn't necessarily the long books that slowed down my progress, as there aren't too many overly-long books; moreso it was getting bogged down in some particularly tedious ones that I was too stubborn not to finish...

The list in full:

1. White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

2. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

3. The Black Swan, Nasim Nicholas Taleb

4. A Throne in Brussels, Paul Belien

5. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey

6. The Eighth Habit, Stephen R. Covey

7. The Liar, Stephen Fry

8. The Naked Politician, Katie Hannon

9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

10. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

11. King Lear, William Shakespeare (re-read)

12. The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington Synge

13. You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay

14. Ship of Fools, Fintan O'Toole

15. The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates
Des Ekin

16. Watchmen
Alan Moore and David Gibbons

17. Truck Fever
Manchán Magan

18. Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
Dan Gardner

19. Blood River
Tim Butcher

20. A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens

21. The Other
Ryszard Kapuscinski

22. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday

23. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami

24. A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole

25. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Barack Obama

26. War, Geopolitics, and History: Conflict in the Middle East
Robert Fisk

27. The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy

28. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

29. House of Meetings by Martin Amis

30. The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

31. Now That's What I Call Jargon by John Murray

32. The Overlook by Michael Connelly

33. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

34. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler