150 books in 2015

[strickvl]

Another year, another beeminder books-read goal.

Read more here.

Yay.

[philip]

Fantastic! I’ve got relatively modest reading goals:

• 10 pages per day of any book
• 1 page per day of my current foreign-language novel

What aspects of this do you beemind? Enquiring minds want to know.

[insti]

Some questions:

What is your reading process like? (Big blocks, small chunks, long commute?)
How much time do you spend reading?
Are you a fast reader? Use speed reading techniques?

[strickvl]

I just beemind the number of books I read per year. I set the goal up at the beginning and the IFTTT is hooked into the Goodreads RSS feed for ‘read’ books and it autoupdates. I thought about minding pages, but I’m actually more interested in a variety of books than a volume of total pages.

[strickvl]

I generally read in sizeable chunks. Usually never less than 30 minutes. 45-60 if I can manage it. If I’m really into a book I’ll just keep going until I finish.
I haven’t really tracked how long I spend reading, so I’m not at all sure. But a non-fiction book about a topic that I already know something about, that’s something I can dispatch in 2-3 hours no problem.

I read a book on speed-reading for my 2013 goal (Breakthrough Reading by Peter Krump and that was one of the best things I have read on that. I know there are a lot of different opinions about whether speed-reading ‘works’ or not, and what it adds to your skill-set etc. The Krump book is good because it sidesteps a lot of those discussions and is firmly practical. It’s structured as a sort of ‘course’, too, so over a period of one or two months, you slowly do various exercises, using books that you yourself want to read. I’ve also read Buzan et al on speed-reading, but Krump is the one I tell everyone to buy. And if you can, get hold of the hardcover/paperback rather than the digital version, since there are various exercises and tables etc that it helps to do with the physical copy.

[philip]

So you have exactly one reading-related Beeminder goal?

[drtall]

Proud of you folks! Keep it up!!

My own reading goal is languishing lately…

[strickvl]

Actually, two. One for “read more fiction”. And one for ‘books read’. But the ‘read more fiction’ is a new addition to my goals (last month or so).

[insti]

You’re 3 times as nerdy as Bill Gates! (This is a compliment )

I am still a proud member of Nerd Nation. As such, I read a lot of books—usually more than 50 a year.

Source

[philip]

I’ve ordered the Krump book on the strength of this, thanks! There were a handful of cheap hardbacks on amazon when I ordered mine, it’ll be interesting to see whether the stock is rapidly depleted by us beemindees!

[strickvl]

Let us know how you get on! It was a real game-changer for me (once I actually did what he said, that is)…

[philip]

I just ran the stats on my reading goal.

Looks as though I read 3,549 pages since mid-February 2015, from 43 different books. That’s pretty much bang on 10 pages per day, which is the slope of my Beeminder goal.

Here’s a summary:

Recreational reading was dominated by The Name of the Rose in Italian (which I’m beeminding one page per day), with a hefty chunk of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in French during my recent consulting engagement in Paris. The bulk of my reading is in English, so I only summarised languages for ‘fiction’ and ‘history’, and excluded foreign-language reading from the subject graph.

As measured by pages, freelancing/career looks hefty, but those books tend to be fluffy, so don’t take very long to get through. I’m building up an independent consulting practice, hence the heavy concentration of sales-oriented business books in 2015.

Update: clarified the non-romantic nature of my visit to Paris (:

[insti]

The discussion on speed reading continues in the Speed reading with Peter Kump thread.