2022 was the first year I decided to set a reading goal. Normally I read a good number of books throughout the year; however when I came home from winter break the possibility of me reaching my goal of reading thirty books in 2022 was looking somewhat grim. When I came home from winter break I had only read 23 books and had about two weeks to read seven more. I may enjoy reading but I was never one of those people who could finish a book in less than five days.
At first, I decided to accept my defeat and move on by reading for my own enjoyment so I started reading “Daisy Jones and the Six” by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I was reading it at a relatively slow pace and easily became annoyed with that. To fix this problem I decided that I would force myself to read twenty pages each time I went to read. Pretty soon twenty became a breeze and I became eager to kick things up a notch and try reading 50 pages every time I went to read. Pretty soon I was finished with “Daisy Jones and the Six” and started reading “Book Lovers” by Emily Henry.
It was while I was reading “Book Lovers” and other books such as “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh that I truly began to realize that 50 pages was no walk in the park. While I would read, sometimes my eyes would wander towards the page numbers to see how much longer I had to read as my willpower to continue reading was starting to wear thin. Yet, I still persisted as I felt that somehow reading 50 pages each time I picked up a book forced me to pay attention more to the book and focus less on other things such as my surroundings.
A little unsure about adopting my 50 pages per read system? Well here are some fun statistics that I collected from my fifty-page reading experiment over break. I was able to finish “Dracula” by Bram Stroker in three days and “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt in four days. I would highly recommend adopting the fifty-page system if you want to read more, longer books as it will hopefully allow you to finish them in a more timely manner so you can read other books, too. In addition to that I managed to read nine books in a time span of four weeks.
Still not sold because of the reasonable fear that you will not have enough time to enjoy the book you are reading? One of my friends brought up this same fear while I was telling her about my new fifty-page system. I can happily report that reading a book in a shorter time span does not take away from the enjoyment of the book. I have been able to enjoy all nine of the books that I read the same as anyone who read them in a longer time span.
If you are still wondering whether or not I was able to achieve my reading goal from 2022, I regret to inform you that I fell three books short. Although I read nine books, I only read four of those in 2022, therefore, falling short of my goal. However, I am not allowing this defeat to get to me as I have decided that this year I will try again with the same reading goal. So far I have read five books out of my goal of 30 which I think proves there is a good possibility that I will finally be able to achieve my goal or possibly exceed it. I hope that everyone else will be able to achieve their reading goals in 2023, happy reading!