Month 0

Month 0 of 260 (0 percent)

Size of list: 77,777 pages (starting size)

Pages read: 204 (0.26 percent)

H-list: 173/22,221 (0.78 percent)

N-list: 31/35,009 (0.06 percent)

O-list: 0/20,547 (0.00 percent)

Read: They'd Rather Be Right

Reading: The Eye of the World

Added: None. All. Depending on how you want to look at it. 

Day 0: Twenty Years

The plan starts tomorrow. I've gotten a head start, reading They'd Rather Be Right and cracking The Eye of the World. And I'm going to finish Infinite Jest, which is not in the plan. 

But the 20-year plan starts now. 

I have decided to do something, to chain myself to a list, for a period equal to half my life so far. When I am done, I will have done it for a third of my life, and I will be nearing retirement. If the baby stays with us, by the time I am done he will have graduated high school. 

That's assuming nothing bad happens. Twenty years is a long time and I am already middle-aged. There is a substantial chance that I won't even live through the next 20 years. And yet I'm going to try to read all these books. Why? Because I can, because I want to, because it's a better use of my time than some other things. 

But I'm still going to paint figures, listen to podcasts, watch TV, and be with my family. We'll see what of those still exist in 20 years. 

Day -3: Year One

I have a list of what I'm going to read the first year. It's not set in stone, and it doesn't have to be exclusive, but I am treating it like I did my reading challenge in 2015. If I get through this list in a year, I'll have read about 10 percent of the list in 5 percent of the time. Considering that the list will grow and the time won't, that seems like a good start.

So, my list, by category but otherwise in an order that mostly doesn't matter:

H-List:
They'd Rather Be Right (already in progress)
Double Star
The Dispossessed
Startide Rising

Speaker for the Dead
Ancillary Justice

N-List:
The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft (volume 1 of a 3-volume complete stories set)
The Dying Earth

The Name of the Wind

O-List:
Solo Command
Fool's Errand
Sanctuary
The Martians
Isard's Revenge
Dragon War

That's 7,330 pages, for 9.4 percent of the total starting list. 

Day -20: Five sevens

Five nines, I read somewhere (probably something by David Cay Johnston), is the reliability level of landline telephone service -- 99.999 percent. Five eights was the account number in Rogue Trader, which has nothing to do with Warhammmer 40,000 but did star Ewan MacGregor.

Once I shifted Sanctuary into the reading plan, that brought my total pages to five sevens: 77,777 pages. It's a bullshit number at that level of specifity, because three books don't even have page counts yet so they just have placeholder figures. No matter. The number is staying. Once I got there a couple weeks ago I decided that I would add no more books until it starts on January 1. 

Day -37: The Wheel of Exceptions

I put together a number of rules for my Reading Plan. They're rules, because I take them seriously, but they're not laws, because there are exceptions. I can always choose to violate the rules if I want (who's going to enforce them but me anyway?). But there is one big exception to a bunch of rules already, and that's Robert Jordan's mega-epic The Wheel of Time. If Lord of the Rings is the Bible, The Wheel of Time is the Mahabharata. It's 12 volumes (the last three of which were written by Brandon Sanderson, who was hired by Jordan's family after Jordan's death to write the last volume but ended up having to write three to cover the ending Jordan had outlined). It's 11,523 pages, which is 15 percent of my plan as it currently stands.

The rules, and how I'm breaking them:

For Appendix N, I put the first book of a series on, and add subsequent volumes only after I read the first and decide to continue. The Wheel of Time is entirely on the list from the get-go.

When deciding what book to read next, pick something from the list with the lowest completed percentage. If it's a tie or close, H>N>O. For the first six years, every January and July, a volume of The Wheel of Time will be the first next book I read on my phone. At two books a year, I should finish it in the summer or fall of 2022.

Books I've already read don't go on the list. I've read the first three already, the third back in 2008. I'm going to reread them, because a seven-year gap won't help me enjoy or understand the books.

Game books and books I read to my kid count as reading for my annual metrics, but not as part of the reading plan. This rule doesn't apply to The Wheel of Time. I just wanted to throw it out there because I plan on resuming reading the Hordemachine fiction as well this year.

Day -47: Head start

I'm not going to finish my list of books to read this year, before starting the Reading Plan. Since I'll keep reading this year's books into next year, I've started reading next year's books this year.

Today I started reading the 1955 Hugo Award winner, They'd Rather Be Right.

I'd prepared for this eventuality. I decided a while ago that if I read any Hugo winners or Appendix N books ahead of the start, I would leave them on the list and add to the numerator; if I finished anything off-list (as I did, two of them), I'd remove them from the list and decrease the denominator. It makes no difference in the actual ratio that matters, the pages to read per day.

It also works well for how I read. I like to have two books in progress at a time: one in print, because I like having and feeling books; and one on my phone, because I can read at times when it would otherwise be inconvenient, most notably in bed with the lights off (so I read white text on a black background). All I have left for this year are two print books, one from the library and one that we own, so I should start something on my phone, and it might as well be my first choice for next year.

Day -47: Year Zero

My reading plan for 2015, and therefore for 2016-2035, started with the 2015 Reading Challenge on the Goodreads app and site. The challenge, as they implemented it, is about how many books you read. I decided to do it differently. I set my target as 11 books, but I also picked out which 11. And, by my standards, it's an ambitious list, headlined by Capital in the 21st Century and Infinite Jest. There were also two Star Wars novels, the next volume in five different series (one of which was also Star Wars), and a couple others.

I made a spreadsheet. I check the sheet every day, keep it updated, and it motivates me. In particular the graph.

In this graph, the red line is, of course, how far through the year we are. The purple line is the percentage of the year's reading I have accomplished. But the orange line, that's the motivator. On the right axis, it's how many pages a day I have to read to finish by the end of the year. I had hoped to see it drop to 0 by the end. Now I'm just hoping to not see it go to 100. 

But it will. Infinite Jest is proving a challenge. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, but I don't think I'll finish it in the next seven weeks, largely because we have a baby in the house now. 

I should note that I went off-list this year, too, adding novels that weren't on the plan. I read The Girl in the Road (and it blew my mind), and then when I finished Ship of Magic I plowed right into the two sequels. In part, this gives me the confidence that I can accomplish the Plan--the total page count of what I've read and plan to read is more than 6,000 pages, with abnormally tough pages taking up a quarter of those. 

Still, I'm going to finish Infinite Jest (and probably Sanctuary) next year, making this year's challenge technically a failure. But it showed me what I can do and how, so I'm calling it a victory. 

Day -47: "Month" and "Book"

As I track my reading by the month, I use my own definition of month, one I wish we all used but that ship sailed 2,000 years ago. Anyway, for the purposes of tracking this, a month is four weeks, which means there are thirteen of them in a year. The extra day at the end (two in leap years) gets added to the last month (because you need that extra day to get anything done with all those holidays). Thus my 20-year challenge is divided on my spreadsheet into 260 months.

The other thing I do is count books as more than one. Or less. Back when I read War and Peace and The Polysyllabic Spree close together, I was unsatisfied with the idea that they both count as one. So I count a book as up to 500 pages, rounded up to the nearest 250. The Polysyllabic Spree counts as half a book; War and Peace counts as two and a half. On my spreadsheet I'm calling this book-units, and I'm trying to use "title" to refer to one book between two covers. I'm not sure it'll matter at all, since I'm counting pages so assiduously, but there it is. Where this has come into play has been my year-by-year tracking of books read, alongside figures painted, how far behind on my podcasts I am, and occasional other metrics. 

Day -49: The O-List

I don't want this blog to be about things outside the reading plan, but a brief note here to explain the gap between the last post and this: my wife and I took in a 12-month-old a week and a half ago. We think we're winding down the transition phase, so the impact on my reading time will be less than it was.

My last list is what I am calling "off-list," meaning books that aren't on the Hugo or Appendix N lists. Of course, then I made a list and put them on it, so now they're on-list, so maybe I should call them "other." But I'm sticking to my original term.

My off-list list started small: large major works such as Ulysses that I've owned and intended on reading for years. The Armada. Cryptonomicon. But then I started thinking about other books. I'm reading the Realm of the Elderlings series, and planned to read one each year. (Instead, I read three of them in 15 weeks; part of why I'm writing this now is I wanted to take the third off the list before I posted. The Liveship Traders, the second trilogy in this world, is really, really good.) I'm still reading the Dragon Jousters. And then there are the Star Wars books: I started reading the X-Wing novels just before I started grad school, and I'm still going. So I just started adding books.

The list has ballooned, and now is ballooning almost for the sake of ballooning. The last book I added was Atlas Shrugged, because my wife says it's good and then John Scalzi said it was good so why not.

I still haven't added everything. I can see books from where I'm sitting now that are on my mental I-should-read-that list, but are not on the reading list. But I might add them.

The O-List stands at 20,252 pages. Right now, that makes it the smallest of the three lists. It will probably, by the end, be the largest of the three lists. It contains sci-fi tie-ins, the last book of a trilogy, the three books I need to read before I read a Hugo winner, books by my favorite authors, books that haven't been published yet, a book I want to read because I like a miniature based on it, a book that Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong recommended, and books that I bought when Borders was going out of business because they looked good.

Day -63: The N-List

The second list of books I will tackle is Appendix E, "Inspirational Reading," from the Dungeons & Dragons 5e Player's Handbook. I'm calling it Appendix N, though, because it's an expansion and update of Appendix N from the 1e Dungeon Master's Guide. The new appendix is superior for my purposes; not only does it add books that have come out in the last four decades, but it specifies particular works where Gary Gygax's original in some cases named only authors.
(I got this idea in part from a bunch of other bloggers who have already done this for Appendix N, such as Black Gate.)
The appendix, in many cases, mentions whole series, e.g. "The Sword of Shannara and the rest of the Shannara novels." For my list, I'm including only the first volume of a series; if I like it enough, I'll add the second volume when I finish the first. There are two exceptions: I'm throwing the entire Wheel of Time on the list right off, all 14 volumes, all 11,523 pages. And for the Discworld series, I'm putting the first volume of each subseries on the list (except the Watch subseries, because I read the first one this year, so it's the second), so four volumes on the list for now, with a potential 28 total.
I also, rather arbitrarily, discarded anything on the list that was a short story (such as A. Merritt's works) but left on short story collections (such as The Best of Leigh Brackett). I may change my mind later, but it won't affect the page count much.
And, of course, I'm leaving off anything I've already read, which will bite me when George R.R. Martin puts out The Winds of Winter, because I plan to reread A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons when that comes out.
The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring (the remaining sequels to A Game of Thrones) and The Thousand and One (sequel to Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed) are the only as-yet-unpublished works that I have put on the list to start with.
Here's the list to start with. Note I am not, unlike the Hugos list, including works I've already read.

Day -67: The H-List

The list of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novel is not the largest list in my reading plan; I suspect by the end of 2035 it will be the smallest, as it will grow only one book a year for 20 years, give or take. (A few years ago, two books won as a single work; and a different few years ago, the 14-volume Wheel of Time was nominated but did not win, but showed that the list could get really big.)

The Hugo winners list is where this idea for a 20-year reading plan came from. When I heard of Puppygate in mid-2015, one lesson I took from it was that there was this rich literature of current books worth arguing about, and I had no idea. I eventually watched the livestream of the Hugo Awards ceremony, skipping the sportsball game my team was playing.

For the purposes of my plan, I have divided the Hugo winners into three periods. The early period starts at the beginning. The middle period begins in 1984, with Startide Rising. I chose this for purely self-serving reasons: beginning in 1984, there is a five-year chunk where all the books are either books I've read or sequels to books I've read. In contrast, the winner in 1983, Foundation's Edge, was book four in a series I've read none of. The late period begins in 2013, which was the year Redshirts won; I had at that point read the first and last Hugo winners, and that amuses me, so that's where I drew that line.

It will not be enough to read one book per year from each list. I'm starting with two from the early period, and one each from the later periods; the early books are shorter, as you can see in this graph I made.

Also, I will read The Dispossessed in 2016, because Katie told me to.

Day -70: What I'm doing.

I decided in July, in the wake of Puppygate, that I should read all the Hugo best novel winners. And since I am 42 years old, and I drive in cars and get sick, that I should make sure I do it before I die. So I gave myself 20 years.

Then I decided to add all the books (or at least the first book in each series) in the "inspirational reading" list in the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. 

Then I decided to add a few other things, major books like Ulysses and Cryptonomicon. 

Then I decided it was silly to be arbitrary to only put some books on the list when I knew I would read other books. I was keeping Ulysses on and Star Wars off, but where would I put Hornby and Coupland and Murakami? So I added most books that I own and plan to read sort-of-soon.

So I now have a list of 179 books, totaling more than 75,000 pages, which will grow because they'll keep giving out Hugos and in many cases I'll continue the series, and because I'll keep adding books that I feel like reading.

I'm not, historically, a big book reader, but when I'm 65 I'll care more about what I've read than what sitcoms I watched. So now I have a spreadsheet and a target. And now I have a blog, because while I'm mainly active on Facebook and Twitter, those are terrible for looking back at things, and I like to look back.

My spreadsheet includes a snapshot of how many pages are on it, because I am also interested in how it will grow. My guess right now is that by the end of the 20 years, it will be 150,000 pages, which is 7,500 pages a year, which is huge.

But this year, I made a one-year reading plan. And it's working. And it includes Capital in the 21st Century, which was hard, and Infinite Jest, which is hard. And the plan is more than 4,000 pages, and when I throw in other stuff I've read it'll be 7,000 pages, but I'll make it. So I think a huge pile of mainly sci-fi and fantasy is doable. I can do it.

In the next few posts I'll talk about my three lists, what's on and off, and about my weird definitions of "book" and "month."