This year the annual reading challenge known as BookTubeAThon has been upgraded to The Reading Rush. The core idea is the same (attempt to read 7 books in seven days while hitting other specified challenges), but it has some fun new social media aspects, sponsors, and most importantly a website where you can track your reading and earn badges: https://thereadingrush.com/.

The Reading Rush takes place from July 22nd through the 28th. For more details as well as an explanation of this year’s challenges, check out this video:

This will be my 5th year participating in this challenge, and I’ve even managed to pull in a few friends and family members to join me. Here’s my current TBR for the week:

1/ Read a book with purple on the cover.
Sal & Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Alberto Pablo Hernandez

2/ Read a book in the same spot the whole time.
Of Thee I Sing by Barack Obama

3/ Read a book you meant to read last year.
57 Tips for Organizing Your Small Business by Julie Bestry

4/ Read an author’s first book.
To Kill a Mocking Bird by Lee Harper (might be audiobook, we’ll see)

5/ Read a book with a non-human main character.
Animal Farm by George Orwell (Audiobook)

6/ Read a book with over five words in the title.
Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

7/ Read and watch a book to movie adaptation.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Audiobook)

If you’d like to see the spreadsheet where I plan and track my own reading, you can view it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EC5hzHNzwmNSsd7H26Ex160uoYpPJG3sflJ80uqCJiw/edit?usp=sharing

The great thing about the Reading Rush is that there are no consequences to failure, only advantages. If you try to read seven books in seven days you are guaranteed to read more than you would have otherwise, which is a success in its own right. If you’ve never tried the Reading Rush (or any reading challenge) before, this could be the year you start!

Good luck!

So, I read 50 books in 2018.

I set a goal last January to read 50 books in one year, while also giving myself an out that if trying to hit such a high number was making reading less fun then I could stop. It turns out reading is still fun, and I made it to my 50, finishing my last book on December 30^th, 2018. To see the full list of what I read, check out my Goodreads page: here

What surprised me was how easy it turned out to be. I’m not saying that it wasn’t work or that I didn’t have to try, just that I expected reading 50 books in a year to feel more like climbing a mountain and less like a series of day hikes.

It also had a weird side effect: I’m more inclined to quit a book mid-way through. This really threw me off, because I figured that needing to hit such a big goal would make my total book count feel more sacred, each completed book more valuable. But reading so many books back-to-back just taught me that certain books aren’t worth my time, and that if I’m not into something I shouldn’t even bother. This means that going forward I’m more likely to set smaller goals for the number of books to read in the year. Not because I won’t read a lot, but because I have a feeling I’ll want to abandon so many.

There was a second layer to my 2018 reading goal, and that was a list of challenges I set for myself. There was a lot of overlap between books and challenges, with some books fulfilling as many as five challenges at once (Bark and The New Jim Crow), and certain challenges applying to almost half of what I read (“Check out and read a library book”). Here are my official designees, with explanations where needed:

Read a book you’ve already read

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Read a political or religious book you think you may disagree with

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Listen to an audiobook

A is for Alibi, 168 Hours, Deep Work, The Princess Diarist, Fly on the Wall, Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Tiny Beautiful Things, and many more…

Read a book that’s over 500 pages

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson

Read a book your audience or friend group won’t be interested in

Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna

Read something by Stephen King

See below.

Quit a book before you’ve finished (or at least skim the rest)

Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Frances

This was a difficult and perfect book to quit early, because there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a fine book and interesting enough, but after a few chapters I realized that with a TBR that’s four years long, there’s really no reason to read anything that’s just “interesting enough” unless there’s some outside reason to read it. And there was no outside reason to finish this book.

Read a book you were given as a gift (and didn’t specifically ask for)

Autumn by Ali Smith

Read a book about (or with heavy themes on) race

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Read a book about (or with heavy themes on) mental illness

Depression and Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim

Check out and read a library book

Vagabonding, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivourous Carnival, The Slippery Slope, The One Thing, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Grim Grotto, Mooncop, Fight Club, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Penultimate Peril, Work Clean, The End, Adulthood is a Myth, A Christmas Memory, The Wicked + The Divine, and many more…

Read a non-fiction book about your career/hobby (or a career/hobby you are hoping to get into someday)

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

I’ve always wished I was the kind of person who went running for fun. Additionally, this book is secretly about writing.

Get rid of a book immediately after reading it

Secret Lives of Men and Women by Frank Warren

Read a book you “should” read

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

This was recommended to me by nearly everyone I met on my solo road trip around the United States – “Have you heard of Wild? You should really read it.”

Read a book you “shouldn’t” waste your time on

Extras by Scott Westerfeld

The forth book in the Uglies series is a real departure from the previous three, so it got mixed reviews. People were expecting a continuation of the same story with the same people, and instead they got a new protagonist, new characters, and new tech. But I already knew all that going in and couldn’t be disappointed in the same way, so as far as I’m concerned this book is just as good as the first three.

Read a book immediately after acquiring it or hearing about it (before it even makes it to the shelf or TBR)

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

I picked up this book at an author event in Seattle. I got to meet Maureen and have her personalize my copy. I took it home and started reading it the very next day. Ironically, I would have done better to let this particular book sit on my shelf for a few years. I didn’t realize it was meant to be Book One of a series, and my only complaint is that it ends on such a cliffhanger that I wish she had waited to publish until she had the whole thing done so I could keep going immediately.

Read a book you think might make you a better person

The Meaning of Freedom by Angela Davis

Read the second biggest book on your shelf (or TBR)

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson

Read The Princess Bride (yes, literally that specific book)

Done. For the fifth time.

Read a book you’ve been “really meaning to read” for way too long

Jesus for the Non-Religious by John Shelby Spong

I actually started this book years ago, really loved it, but somehow never finished. In finally finishing it I realized that the reason I probably quit was the elements that interested me most started to disappear after the first few chapters.

Read a book of short stories

Bark by Lorrie Moore

Read a book with a cover that bothers you

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Because there’s a bear on it and they never actually encounter a bear. Also I don’t think the quality of the combined images is very good.

Get rid of a book without reading it

Indian for Everyone by Anupy Singla

This was a cookbook that I got as a gift. I’ve found that I just don’t use cookbooks as much anymore, preferring to cultivate my own as I find new recipes. I briefly considered getting rid of all my cookbooks in the same moment, but most of what I have holds sentimental value. Plus I still enjoy having a couple classics around like The Joy of Cooking, Better Home and Gardens, and Betty Crocker.

Get at least 2 books behind or ahead of schedule at some point in the year

Managed to do this pretty early, as I was already two books behind by February. I got all the way up to five books ahead of schedule right after BookTubeAThon in August.

Decide not to do one of the challenges on this list

I never got around to reading any Stephen King.

—

A friend asked if I had a top three recommendations from my year, which is difficult both because I read so many great ones, and because each book fulfills a slightly different need.

So here are three books that are beautiful and heartbreaking and sad and hopeful:

1. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
2. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
3. Mooncop by Tom Gauld

Three books that are important and well-crafted and teach you things about the world that will make you a better, more informed human:

1. The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow
2. Sex at Dawn by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan
3. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? By Roz Chast

And one book that is just the best and always has been:

1. The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I set a comparatively low goal for 2019 (just 25 books), but hope to overtake it by quite a ways. Whatever your reading goals are for 2019, I hope they make you happy and I wish you the best of luck!

This year I experienced a BookTubeAThon miracle. I read eight books in seven days.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that every year I create a spreadsheet outlining which books I plan to read and how many pages they all are. I use that to plan out my week. I do this because if I don’t have a clear number goal in mind, I will always give up early and decide I’ve already done enough work for the day (this is true for more than just reading marathons). So I use my spreadsheet to figure out the number of pages I need to read each day, then I make a plan for what I’ll read when.

Everything was going according to plan until Wednesday, when I stayed extra long at a work party and completely missed my daily goal. I figured I would just make it up in the second half of the week (I tend to front-load my plan for just this reason), and set to work reading on Thursday. And then, somehow, it was Saturday afternoon and I realized I would easily finish the last two books on my list before I needed to go to bed. While I suppose I could have taken this as a sign that I should slow down and do something other than read for a little while, I instead decided it would be exceptionally satisfying to say that I once read seven books in six days. And then I realized that there was a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories on my desk, which was intended to be the book I read after the challenge was over. But it’s only 142 pages – well below the number of pages I’d been averaging. So on Sunday morning I picked it up, and even with going to church and watching a movie, I was still done by 11PM.

I’m calling it a miracle because I still don’t totally understand how it happened. I have a spreadsheet detailing my original plan as well as the actual pages read every day, and I still don’t get it. There’s math and yet I can’t really tell you what happened. The numbers of course clearly illustrate how I read 1553 pages in seven days, and yet somehow it doesn’t add up.

I just read. A lot.

A few quick recaps of the books I read:

The Underground Railroad was about as cheerful as you would guess an American slavery story to be, but it was also extremely well-written and imaginative. But I suppose if you win a Pulitzer Prize you don’t need the stamp of approval from people like me.

The Princess Diarist was lovely. Half of it is Carrie Fisher casually telling you stories abut her life, and half of it is excerpts from the personal journals she kept as a 19-year-old working on the set of Star Wars. The journal entries are about as angsty as a teenager’s journal ought to be, but they are also beautiful and poetic. It’s like every line is your favorite Death Cab for Cutie lyric. I listened to it on audiobook from the library but I want a copy for my home, so this book is definitely going on my Christmas list.

Mooncop is a wonderful and bittersweet little graphic novel about the last police officer on an out-of-vogue moon colony. It probably took me all of ten minutes to read and I loved it. This was my only “cheat” book of the week.

Fly on the Wall is about a teenage girl who wishes she could be a fly on the wall of the boys locker room and then literally becomes one. It’s a fun little book and has some nice messaging when it comes to race, sexuality, and body image. Recommended for readers under 15 or anyone who just wants to feel good about life for a little while.

A is For Alibi was a little disappointing, but since disappointment is a direct result of expectations that may have been my fault. I think I was expecting something a little more complicated and thrilling. I do agree that the detective character, Kinsey Millhone, is a great personality to build a series on. So I understand how Sue Grafton was able to write 25 books about her.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was an audiobook I had on hold with the library that finally became available in the middle of the week. I decided it could be my book about “something you’ve always wanted to do.” I’ve always wanted to be a runner. I don’t really want to run exactly; I actually hate running. I’ve just always wished I was that type of person, the type of person who trained for marathons and got intense zen satisfaction from a two-hour run. I’m not that person. But I am a writer just like the book’s author, Haruki Murakami. He talked about writing and running interchangeably, and it was interesting hearing how he viewed each.

Fight Club was a strange experience. I read the book and then re-watched the movie to compare the two. Most of the movie was an extremely faithful adaptation of the book, something that is very difficult because of the intentionally chaotic way the book is written. I found myself seeing the movie scenes in my head as I read, and by the end I actually questioned how the movie ended, because I could see Edward Norton so clearly in the book’s ending. I never really liked the ending of the Fight Club movie, and I think the original is far superior. But somehow reading the book gave me a better understanding and appreciation of the movie, including its ending.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a different experience. The parts of the movie that are faithful to the book are almost word-for-word readings. But then there are entire plots added and dropped along the way. The truly shocking thing is that not only does the book not end as a happy romantic comedy, it’s not a romance at all. Holly and the narrator never have any sort of love affair. He’s clearly infatuated with her, but nothing ever comes of it and in the end she leaves him, and New York, forever. What was even more surprising is how small the character of Yunioshi is in the book, and how racially progressive. In contrast to Mickey Rooney’s racist caricature in the movie, when Yunioshi is described by a bartender in the book as a photographer “from Japan,” the narrator corrects him to say, “from California.” It’s hard to say how racially progressive the rest of the book is, because it suffers from some dated racial language that is hard for the modern reader to separate from prejudice. It’s certainly sexually progressive, with Holly Golightly being a self-described bisexual and suggesting that everyone is bi to some degree.

Because of my BookTubeAThon miracle I ended up five books ahead in my goal to read 50 books this year. I’ve been behind since February, so it feels good to not only be on track, but to have some wiggle room. Since I can’t attribute this year’s success to anything in particular, I’m not sure if I should build on it or not. Since I only had one tiny book and I ended up reading an extra one, it means that for the first time my seven books were really, truly, books. Yes, books like Fight Club and Fly on the Wall are short. But The Underground Railroad and A is for Alibi are not. Do I try for seven real books again next year? I’m not sure.

I will say that on par with reading eight books in seven days was getting BOTH of my parents and a family friend to participate in BookTubeAThon. Which means no matter what I do next year, for 2018 I can take credit for 29 books read in a single week.

I may be reading 50 books this year.

Ever since I discovered reading challenges and Booktube a few years ago, I’ve wanted to have a 50 book year. It’s a very common goal online, and for avid readers it’s pretty attainable. I’m not necessarily an avid reader, but I’ve managed 24 books a year two years in a row, so it’s not an insane idea.

However I’ve recently realized that setting goals and sticking with them is only helpful so long as the goals are aligned with your interests. I’ve had a number of occasions where I stuck with a goal for far too long (usually to completion) without acknowledging that I didn’t actually want it anymore. I think I want to read 50 books this year, but more than that I want to read as much as I can while still enjoying it. I don’t want to start reading “cheat books” just to get my numbers up, and I don’t want to push myself to finish something terrible just to say I did.

So I’m setting my Goodreads challenge at 30 books, and I’m planning to read three and a half books in January. Assuming I participate in BookTubeAThon and #ReadingBingo again this year, three and a half books a month will get me to 50 and then some. So if January feels good, I’ll up the Goodreads goal a bit. If I still feel this way in a few months, it will go to 50 books.

Part of what I like about reading challenges is the way it gets you to switch up what you might normally reach for, so I decided I wanted to have a challenge list for this year as well. But in the spirit of setting goals that are aligned with my interests, I wrote my own list. It is purposely not 50 items long, and I’ll probably double up on some anyway. This way I never have to refuse a book I want to read just because it’s not on the list. If you’re looking for a challenge I’d love for you to try mine. Or better yet, write your own.

Katrina’s 2018 Reading Challenge

1. Read a book you’ve already read
2. Read a political or religious book you think you may disagree with
3. Listen to an audiobook
4. Read a book that’s over 500 pages
5. Read a book your audience or friend group won’t be interested in
6. Read something by Stephen King
7. Quit a book before you’ve finished (or at least skim the rest)
8. Read a book you were given as a gift (and didn’t specifically ask for)
9. Read a book about (or with heavy themes on) race
10. Read a book about (or with heavy themes on) mental illness
11. Check out and read a library book
12. Read a non-fiction book about your career/hobby (or a career/hobby you are hoping to get into someday)
13. Get rid of a book immediately after reading it
14. Read a book you “should” read
15. Read a book you “shouldn’t” waste your time on
16. Read a book immediately after acquiring it or hearing about it (before it even makes it to the shelf or TBR)
17. Read a book you think might make you a better person
18. Read the second biggest book on your shelf (or TBR)
19. Read The Princess Bride (yes, literally that specific book)
20. Read a book you’ve been “really meaning to read” for way too long
21. Read a book of short stories
22. Read a book with a cover that bothers you
23. Get rid of a book without reading it
24. Get at least 2 books behind or ahead of schedule at some point in the year
25. Decide not to do one of the challenges on this list

Good luck and happy reading!