these are not excuses about the book challenge.
so essentially i have 104 days left to finish my self-imposed book challenge and must read 52 books in that time (51 if books on tape count towards the total)-- exactly two books per day. obviously not an achievable goal, unless i start counting hop on pop or the like.
i'm kind of disappointed, but i realize this is absolutely due to the fact that i set the goal (which was somewhat impractical as it was) when my life was pretty empty of things to do and now life is pretty full and pretty great-- which is great for my life but not great for by literary goals.
had i stayed on pace with the first few months (reading between 8 and 9 books each month), i would have just about hit 100 by august. but there were several months where i read only 3 or 4 books, which obviously didn't help with the numbers.
one of the biggest changes from september, when i started the challenge, was that i wasn't driving to and from the falls, which adds another 10 hours per week of driving time. that's 10 hours every single week i could have been reading, or doing whatever other things i was doing instead of reading for the past several months.
i've also been spending a lot more time with friends and family, doing social things on weekends and spending a lot more time really getting into hobbies (sewing, beading, etc). also great, but it means less reading time.
moving back home has also meant several weeks worth of organizing the last 6 years of my life into one bedroom and one bathroom, which still need to have livable, sensible space. this has required untold hours of packing, unpacking, sorting, throwing away, storing and debating storing a TON of stuff, much of which i never realized i still owned.
netflix is a growing addiction, particularly now that they have free movies online. i am considering putting my account on hold for the summer, so i can pull myself away from the movie addiction.
while i have been lovingly rearranging my books on their shelves-- organized by genre, then conceptually, then put in some semblance of order i hope to attack them in-- i've actually been reading library books exclusively for over a month, which had been the plan for before and after the move, as my books were hard to find. but now that i'm here, the new ones are piling up, waiting for me to crack them open and move them from the "to read" bookcase to the "already read" bookcase. they are calling to me, but the library books have a due date that carries a fine, so there's a dilemma.
as of this moment, i am in the middle of three books-- a nonfiction book about poverty i have been stalled on for a number of weeks, a novel i really like but haven't had time for and another nonfiction book about the Seaway that's sort of for work. it would be great to finish at least one by the end of the week, but i guess we'll have to see...
for now, my plan is just to see how the next few months unfold. if i don't get to 100 by the end of the summer, i plan to continue reading and keeping track until the goal is reached-- and that includes the nonfiction goal i had set, which is getting harder to make myself stick to, since i move through nonfiction much more slowly than fiction.
if i have to revise my plan, maybe i will look at the number of books to read currently languishing on my shelves and challenge myself to read a certain percentage of them by the end of the year. or maybe i'll take a look at my page count and see if there's a goal i can set there that would encourage me to approach some of the longer tomes i've avoided during this challenge because it would be harder to accrue a large number of books if many of them were lengthy. we'll see, i guess.
for now, i should head to bed-- which is another thing i've been doing more of. i'm getting more sleep now than i have since middle school. it's glorious.
i'm kind of disappointed, but i realize this is absolutely due to the fact that i set the goal (which was somewhat impractical as it was) when my life was pretty empty of things to do and now life is pretty full and pretty great-- which is great for my life but not great for by literary goals.
had i stayed on pace with the first few months (reading between 8 and 9 books each month), i would have just about hit 100 by august. but there were several months where i read only 3 or 4 books, which obviously didn't help with the numbers.
one of the biggest changes from september, when i started the challenge, was that i wasn't driving to and from the falls, which adds another 10 hours per week of driving time. that's 10 hours every single week i could have been reading, or doing whatever other things i was doing instead of reading for the past several months.
i've also been spending a lot more time with friends and family, doing social things on weekends and spending a lot more time really getting into hobbies (sewing, beading, etc). also great, but it means less reading time.
moving back home has also meant several weeks worth of organizing the last 6 years of my life into one bedroom and one bathroom, which still need to have livable, sensible space. this has required untold hours of packing, unpacking, sorting, throwing away, storing and debating storing a TON of stuff, much of which i never realized i still owned.
netflix is a growing addiction, particularly now that they have free movies online. i am considering putting my account on hold for the summer, so i can pull myself away from the movie addiction.
while i have been lovingly rearranging my books on their shelves-- organized by genre, then conceptually, then put in some semblance of order i hope to attack them in-- i've actually been reading library books exclusively for over a month, which had been the plan for before and after the move, as my books were hard to find. but now that i'm here, the new ones are piling up, waiting for me to crack them open and move them from the "to read" bookcase to the "already read" bookcase. they are calling to me, but the library books have a due date that carries a fine, so there's a dilemma.
as of this moment, i am in the middle of three books-- a nonfiction book about poverty i have been stalled on for a number of weeks, a novel i really like but haven't had time for and another nonfiction book about the Seaway that's sort of for work. it would be great to finish at least one by the end of the week, but i guess we'll have to see...
for now, my plan is just to see how the next few months unfold. if i don't get to 100 by the end of the summer, i plan to continue reading and keeping track until the goal is reached-- and that includes the nonfiction goal i had set, which is getting harder to make myself stick to, since i move through nonfiction much more slowly than fiction.
if i have to revise my plan, maybe i will look at the number of books to read currently languishing on my shelves and challenge myself to read a certain percentage of them by the end of the year. or maybe i'll take a look at my page count and see if there's a goal i can set there that would encourage me to approach some of the longer tomes i've avoided during this challenge because it would be harder to accrue a large number of books if many of them were lengthy. we'll see, i guess.
for now, i should head to bed-- which is another thing i've been doing more of. i'm getting more sleep now than i have since middle school. it's glorious.