I gave three of the designated four hours (and an undisclosed amount of dollars) to yesterday’s National Readathon Day. Four hours doesn’t sound like much when you’ve participated in readathons that last six times that long. But it turned out to be a nearly ideal amount of time to commit to reading on a Saturday afternoon–long enough to be productive, yet limited enough to stay (mostly) focused. I didn’t actually make the commitment until yesterday morning, when it looked like it would fit into other plans for the day, but I’m glad I did it. (Winchester reports on my results at the end of this post.)
I’m trying to commit to something else reading-related this year: I have succumbed to the lure of the “reading spreadsheet.” (You might think that spreadsheets would be a must-have for a book-blogging accountant, but they haven’t been for this one.) I’m working with a slightly modified version of the Track Reading Spreadsheet used (and shared) by Kerry at Entomology of a Bookworm, and I think that if I stick with it and remember to update it as I go along, I’ll have even more fun with data when I make my reading charts at the end of this year. I’m learning a few things already:
- For the first time, I’ll know how many pages I read over a given length of time, and how many days I spend on a book. I suspect I won’t like that latter statistic very much.
- While I’m interested in seeing what my completed reading adds up to, I’m not especially interested in tracking “progress” through individual books. I think I’d have to update that daily for it to be meaningful, and I know I don’t make enough reading “progress” on a daily basis to bother with that.
- All but one of the authors I’ve read so far this year are white, American females. The exception is a white American male whose novel could be filed under “women’s fiction.” I have been resistant to applying “diversity” measures to my reading choices and I’m still not sure I will deliberately change anything. However, I’m not comfortable with what this reflects, so I have some further reflection to do.
We don’t have much planned for the second warm, windy day of this weekend. I foresee reading, writing, TV, and possibly napping, in no particular order. I have a short but intense work week ahead—intense mostly because, for reasons I’ll share later this week, it’ll be short—and I think I’ll appreciate a low-intensity Sunday. What are you up to today?
The Weekly Winchester
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| “I read 100 pages of a galley & 70 pages of an ebook during 3 hours. Winchester didn’t read anything. #TimeToRead #readathon #dogsofinstagram #Winchester” |
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