Slow Reading Progress
.I haven’t been reading very much recently. I did finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Four Pillars of Investing recently, but overall it’s been a rather slow year, almost half gone already and only nine books finished.
That’s actually an extremely low total for me. In 2005 I setarted setting myself yearly targets for books to read, enlisting my OCD side to get myself past periods where I was reluctant to read. In 2005 my target was 60, and I read 60 books. Last year the target was 70, and I read 73 books. This year the target is 75, and I’m going to have to read an awful lot to get there at this point. For comparison, at this point in 2005 I’d read 20 books, and at this point last year I’d read 17. I guess that means that the first half of the year tends to be a little slower for me, for whatever reason. Seasonal swings in reading? I’m not sure what would contribute to that.
Similarly, I’m not sure why I haven’t been reading as much. Part of it was due to trying and failing to change my reading habits, which definitely set me back a while. I could claim that it’s the blogging, but I still read a lot after beginning to blog every day last year.
Some of it is an attempt at reading discipline, in that I’m trying to just read one book at a time, and not start any more books until I’ve finished the one I’m on. Sadly, The Pope’s Children torpedoed that effort, as while its content is extremely interesting, the style and tone eventually drove me away and into other books.
Somehow, I go through periods where I kind of “forget” about reading as an option for how to spend my time. This seems to be related to web surfing. When I was younger, reading was more or less my default activity, and I would always be stuck into a book. Now, left to my own devices, I seem to gravitate to web surfing instead, which I do not think is a good thing. In fact, one of the arguments for pushing myself to reach reading targets is precisely to push myself away from web surfing as an activity.
I begin to wonder if I should start tracking how much time I spend daily reading things online, just to get an idea of how many hours I sink into that. It could be a scarily high total.