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.