20,200 Pages
This year, at the start of January, I set a page-based reading goal for myself. 20,200 pages in 2020. This came out to 55.3 pages per day, which sounded pretty impossible. I’m always reading, but up until March, most weekends were spent running around and most weeknights were spent catching up on work, seeing friends, or attending meetings.
The pandemic changed all of that, and I hit my goal and kept reading.
As of December 1st (since I haven’t added up this month’s page count), I’ve read 20,732 pages. I counted pages by going onto Amazon after I finished the book and grabbing the hardcover page amount. Almost every book was in hardcover, so I felt this was the best way to get a fairly accurate count. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it meant that I read longer books because I wasn’t obsessed with hitting a book count. Instead, I chose what I wanted to read, regardless of how long it would take to get through because I knew it was all about the pages. In some ways, longer books were easier than shorter books because I didn’t need to learn a new set of characters or plotline. Even so, I also ended up reading more books overall this year. So it was a win-win.
It worked well, so I’m going to aim for 20210 pages in 2021.
This year, I’ve read 63 books so far. One was an audio book (so I didn’t add it to the page count). Ten were extra books I snuck in doing my #15Best thing, a mix of fiction and non-fiction.
All of my regular books were fiction.
My favourite things I’ve read this year:
- Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (Leigh Bardugo)
- The Hand on the Wall (Maureen Johnson)
- The Sentence is Death (Anthony Horowitz)
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Holly Jackson)
- A Deadly Inside Scoop (Abby Collette)
- The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett)
- Exciting Times (Naoise Dolan)
- Blue Ticket (Sophie Mackintosh)
- Seven Lies (Elizabeth Kay)
- The Lion’s Den (Katherine St. John)
- Boyfriend Material (Alexis Hall)
- So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo)
- When No One Is Watching (Alyssa Cole)
- His and Hers (Alice Feeney)
- The Silver Arrow (Lev Grossman)
- Last Tang Standing (Lauren Ho)
- Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
- That Time of Year (Marie NDiaye)
What is on your list of favourite reads this year? (Feel free to list movies or television shows if books are not your thing.)
3 comments
Wow, way to go, Mel! I’m still hoping to squeeze in at least one more book before the year is over. Currently, I’m at 41 books (my Goodreads goal was 30), 12,257 pages (according to Goodreads). Not quite as high as the 50 books/15,607 pages I did last year — and I started counting re-reads this year too — but, hey, pandemic. I think I did all right. 😉 . 19 fiction (including a couple that were re-reads) and 22 non-fiction.
Normally I find it hard to pick just one book as my “best of the year,” but this year, I did have one that stood out above the rest, from early in 2020, and that was “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett. Five stars, and I’m still thinking about it, almost a year later.
I’ve read a lot more this year than usual, too. I didn’t think to track words read (great idea) but on Goodreads I do a yearly reading challenge. I set my goal this year for 50 books, and as of today, I have read 94 books!
I was talking with a friend last week about why I read so much more this year than usual. In my case, I’m not sure that it was due to having a lot more free time to read because despite cutting out commuting and some social activities, I’m still quite busy with work and overseeing my kids’ online school. I think a big factor for me is that I generally read at least one non-fiction book a month, and this year I have read more light fiction.
I can easily breeze through a 300-400-page novel in a day or two, while most non-fiction books take longer, for a few reasons. This year I’ve also struggled with reading a lot of “literature” by which I mean works of fiction that are longer, heavier or stylistically more difficult to read.
BTW, you and I read a couple of the same titles this year (based on your list of favorites), and your list also includes some titles on my “Want to Read” list and a few I’ll probably add after seeing your reviews. 🙂
I really enjoyed Such A Fun Age and Front Desk. And I got to reread the Harry Potter series with my 9 year old which was so much fun.