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.