At the beginning of this year, I took a break from Twitter (which lasted three months), and set myself a target to read at least 50 books during the calendar year. As things stand now, the number stands at 28, and it’s unlikely that I’ll hit my target, unless I count Berry’s story books in the list.
While I’m not particularly worried about my target, what I am worried about is that the target has made me see books differently. For example, I’m now less liable to abandon books midway – the sunk cost fallacy means that I try harder to finish so that I can add to my annual count. Sometimes I literally flip through the pages of the book looking for interesting things, in an attempt to finish it one way or the other (I did this for Ray Dalio’s Principles and Randall Munroe’s What If, both of which I rated lowly).
Then, the target being in terms of number of books per year means that I get annoyed with long books. Like it’s been nearly a month since I started Jonathan Wilson’s Angels with dirty faces , but I’m still barely 30% of the way there – a figure I know because I’m reading it on my Kindle.
Even worse are large books that I struggle to finish. I spent about a month on Bill Bryson’s At Home, but it’s too verbose and badly written and so I gave it up halfway through. I don’t know if I should put this in my reading challenge. A similar story is with Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies – this morning, I put it down for maybe the fourth time (I bought it whenever it was first published) after failing to make progress – it’s simply too dry for someone not passionate about the subject.
Oh, and this has been the big insight from this reading challenge – that I read significantly faster on Kindle than I do on physical books. Firstly, it’s easier to carry around. Secondly, I can read in the dark since I got myself a Kindle Paperwhite last year. One of the times when I read from my kindle is in the evening when I’m putting Berry to sleep, and that means I need to read in the dark with a device that doesn’t produce so much light. Then, the ability to control font size and easy page turns means that I progress so much faster – even when I stop to highlight and make notes (a feature I miss dearly when reading physical books; searchable notes are a game changer).
I also find that when I’m reading on Kindle, it’s easier to “put fight” to get through a book that is difficult to read but is insightful. That’s how managed to get through Diana Eck’s India: A Sacred Geography, and that’s the reason I made it a point to buy Jordan Peterson’s book on Kindle – I knew it would be a tough read and I would never be able to get through it if I were to read the physical version.
Finally, the time taken to finish a book follows a bimodal distribution. I either finish off the book in a day or two, or I take a month to finish it. For example, I went to Copenhagen for a holiday in August, and found a copy of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short in my AirBnB. I was there for three days but finished off in that time. On the other hand, 12 rules for life took over a month.