How many books do you think you could read in a year? That was the challenge posed to me on Goodreads. The site tempted me to sign up for a Reading Challenge. This was an exciting proposition after all reading rates in the United States have steadily declined. According to a Pew Research study 2016, the percentage of U.S. adults who reported reading a book of any kind in the last 12 months was 73%, down from previous years. People have virtually stopped reading newspapers; only 7% prefer to read the news from an actual newspaper, while 34% get their news online. The sad state is U.S. adults are becoming ignorant, illiterate lumps. They consume news and information from hoary sources such as Facebook and Twitter (I’m not calling it X, that’s just stupid). #GetOffTwitter #ReadABook #FuckHashTags
So okay, I’ll bite. I’ll sign up for the Reading Challenge. I’d recently rediscovered the joy of reading, and this sounded like an excellent way to keep me engaged. After all, I looked back on the previous year of reading and noticed I read about 20 books. How magnanimous of me, Mr. Seventy-Three Percent. I could do at least that, maybe even two books a month. Twenty-four, then, that’s a respectable number. But I worked in the city, commuting three hours a day from home to work and back, and I blew by that 24 number in three months . That’s what three hours on a train five days a week will get you. I know that’s a quick run through that number of books, but that’s what weventy-Three Percenters do. I tried to pick a large enough number to make it challenging but not ridiculous. I mean, I’m not one of those bougie Ninety Percent types. Anyway, some super lousy back-of-the-envelope math and I landed on 150; that’s 150 books I would try to read.
I was not alone in my challenge. Goodreads reports that 4,161,658 people attempted the 2018 reading challenge, pledging to read 251,791,151 books; that’s an average of 60 books per participant so that 150 number looks pretty crazy right now. What brand of glue was I sniffing? Well, only 24,610 people completed their challenges. That’s less than one percent, so if I fail, I’d be the same as 4,137,048 others.
I finished, but it took work. You should have heard a long, drawn-out “ought” sound in that not. I struggled towards the end, critically examining each book I was about to read like Harry Winston putting together The Gulf Pearl Parure. The shortest book was 30 pages, The Course of Human Events by David McCullough, which was initially a 2003 speech at the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. While the longest was Outlander by Diana Gabaldon at a mountainous 866 pages, I’m told it’s a T.V. series now. This was also the most popular book I read; again, from Goodreads, 748,234 people reported reading this doorstop. Ugh, I should have watched the T.V. series. I read 48,334 pages, making the average book about 320 pages. Here’s the kicker: all these pages and books only came from 79 authors.
There was a run on a few story series during my reading, namely all the Walt Longmire books by Craig Johnson, the most glaring transgression with 19, the Joe Picket books by C.J. Box, and all the Hunt For Reacher books by Diane Capri. Just these authors alone accounted for 48 of my books, and I read them in order, one right after the other - the brand is Testors, by the way. Crist, I started to think I was living in Wyoming, but I did this with ten different book series. That’s right, breathe deeply and keep reading. That sharp headache goes away in a couple of hours. This jaunty pace of firing through the Longmire series, which are excellent reads, led to the inflated sense of self and contributed to the challenge’s 150 number. Each book is meant to stand on its own. Story elements thread through the series, but the backstory gets repeated, whole paragraphs at times, the exact fucking words, lovely trick peeps. This usually happens towards the beginning of the book. It doesn’t diminish the original storyline. Still, it is noticeable, so be careful not to glue your nostrils closed.
Not every book was a celebration. I started some books I had to put down, like Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella. If I read another “rags to riches” narrative about some tech CEO who’s been given every break in life and pretends they bootstraped themselves from nothing, I’m going to wager them a dollar to swap places with a commoner and see how they fare. They would utterly collapse as a human being. Mr. Nadella is entirely off-target at times. This book is meant for an American audience, but this asshat compares essential life lessons to Cricket. That’s not a typo, Cricket. Again, that’s the game of Cricket, which you are probably Googling right now, so I’ll save you the effort. It would be like if the English invented baseball. Another that missed the mark for me was the Mitch Rapp book Transfer of Power by Vince Flynn. I kept imagining the writing would get better. They wouldn’t let a middle school child compose and publish a book, would they? It gets better, right? Nope. Others, like Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America by John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, would claim too much study, and at the godlike reading speeds I foresaw, I had to skip.