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.