2022 Reading Challenge

I’ve been doing this reading challenge thing on Goodreads for the past few years. I’ve been challenging myself to reading 15 books in recent years. In 2021, I missed my challenge by 2 books. In 2022, I barely squeaked by with 15 books.

For most of the second half of the year, it was looking like I was going to miss my goal. I was sort of vaguely feeling like this was unfair, because I have been reading three very fat books this year - here, here, and here - and I estimate I read something like 1500 pages out of these three books in 2022 that aren’t accounted for in my challenge.

But I pulled it out in the end! I might have engaged in a little trickery to do so. First off, I added in three books that I read with my son. I don’t normally include books that I read with my children, but even so, it feels fair enough if I include them. I also put in a book that I read that was about 30 pages. It was really rather an essay published as a book. This almost feels like cheating, but I figure it’s okay, since I read about 1500 pages that didn’t contribute into the challenge.

One time I wrote to the team at Goodreads, suggesting that the reading challenge was a little unbalanced because it doesn’t take into account the length of the books read. They pointed me to an interesting resource which I hadn’t seen before, which tracks your reading by number of pages. Here is me over the past few years, but I think you need to be logged in to see it:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/stats/578242#pages

These bars still only track page counts from books that I’ve finished, so the 2022 counts don’t reflect the three fat books I mentioned above.

I love Goodreads for a lot of reasons. Mainly, it helps me keep track of the books I’ve read, and the books I want to read. I must be getting old, because I often don’t remember if I’ve read a book or not. It’s also fun to write reviews. Because I am a little lazy, I don’t write reviews nearly as often as I should. I find the reviews and ratings at Goodreads very valuable, and they often help me evaluate future reading, such as when choosing a translation. Goodreads has a whole social media side to it, which is interesting, but definitely not important to me.

I have always been very self-conscious about my publicly searchable self out here on the internets. I guess I have always had reasons to worry about people shunning me for crazy of offensive beliefs or whatever. But I make an exception on Goodreads, because, after all, these are just books. If somebody wants to cancel me because of a book that I’ve read, or rated highly, or want to read, well I guess they can go right ahead! Can you imagine getting ornery with someone because they read the wrong book? But honestly, go ahead, browse through my “already read” and “want to read” lists, and you will find some seriously crazy shit! You might just get offended, lol!

Anyway, I am sharing all this with you now because I am looking for stuff to write about here on substack that might not require utmost care and hours of research. So I thought I might review some of the stuff I read last year. I guess that Yahweh series really wiped me out! It was a lot of research, and some difficult stuff to write. I still want to write these kinds of in-depth, researched, carefully constructed posts. I just don’t want to do it every week. Oh yeah, I’ve sort of upped my publishing schedule from every other week to every week, because I feel like it will help keep a bit better of a thread of continuity. Which, of course, feeds into my desire to find some lighter things to write about!

Okay, so I’m not going to be doing any book reviews today, since I think I’ve already said enough. But I plan to run through some of last year’s reading list over the upcoming weeks. Cheers!