The 2021 Annual Reading Challenge Discussion Thread

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

My TBR is now at 840, down 61 on the start of the year. But that's mostly because I discarded 54 magazines I decided I wasn't enjoying reading.

I acquired a lot of books in March. Eight freebies, and 11 bought books. The freebies were an omnibus of a series where I read the first, and so added the others to my TBR when I enjoyed it. The bought books were mostly a series on special offer by an author I like.

So in total, 19 books added to my TBR, and only 11 read. With a couple of other adjustments, I ended March with 846 books on my TBR. Definitely moving in the wrong direction!

But I can't say that any of the books I got were books I shouldn't have got.

I expect April will be less generous. Although I have already bought three books that were on my wishlist, and dropped to £0.99 in this month's Amazon offers.

A very enjoyable reading month. At least my TBR pile is getting to be of higher quality, if not a lot shorter

[Uncle Robin]

Going through "My Books" at Kobo to add books to my TBR has been instructive. Sorted from oldest to newest, I'm only on page 2 of the list, and have already had 4 "sorry, we no longer have that book". These are books I bought and paid for, but which Kobo now says "no, go away". How glad I am that I downloaded and de-drmed all of them.

[astrangerhere]

Length Goals:

• Total Books: 75 (stretch goal of 100) (up from 50/75 last year)
• Total Pages: 25,000
• E-TBR Reduction: 25
• Print-TBR Reduction: 10

Substantive Goals:

• Read at least 51% non-American authors
• Read more female/nonbinary authors than male
• Read at least 52 short stories
• Read at least 10 books across all our collections that are my wife's or that she wants me to read.

Cumulative Totals Through End of March:

• Total Books: 41 - 55% of goal, 41% of stretch goal - ON TARGET
• Total Pages: 7759 - 31% of goal - ON TARGET
• Gender Goal: 54% Female, 0% Nonbindary, 46% Male - ON TARGET
• Country of Origin Goal: 45% USA, 55% out of US - ON TARGET
• E-TBR Reduction: +10 - ON TARGET
• Print TBR Reduction: -29* OFF TARGET
• Short Stories: 18, 35% of goal - ON TARGET
• Books Recommended by my wife: 3 - 30% of goal ON TARGET

*My wife continues to buy 1-2 books a week from our local independent bookstore and will do until they are able to fully open again post-covid. I expect this to skew my PTBR list all year long, but its for a good cause.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

I had a crazy busy February, not a single page of leisure reading. Back on track now in March, working through my TBR in descending page length order, to have a nice lazy finish at the end of the year., and because three of the short books on my TBR are not in my L1 language.

Reading in page length order gives you some pretty dramatic changes for what you are reading, I'll bet. Most of my TBR wouldn't work as it is primarily series.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Reading in page length order gives you some pretty dramatic changes for what you are reading, I'll bet.

Yes, it has, although most of the 500+ were SF, as are several of the longest remaining. Maybe the old pulp pay-by-the-word ethos has become part of SF writers' DNA

[Paperbackstash]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

What is this stat? I tried to read this as "average days to read a single book" but the math doesn't work out on that. 90 books over 90 days. Are you using a start date and end date but have 6-7 books going at a time?


For my goals, I'm well ahead but I also greatly reduced my goal this year. I'm still trying to figure out what my new status quo will be.

It's a formula I'm using, I go by start and end dates, but with a few exceptions since I read several at once, some sit on the back burner brewing for awhile, a few (not many) from the end of last year. This is what is driving the average up when it's mixing it all together. I'm especially slow with anthologies.

[Paperbackstash]

I'm still in a mystery mood, leftover from March, so I'm guessing April will also have a lot of mysteries in it. Fortunately there's so many good books out there.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Paperbackstash

It's a formula I'm using, I go by start and end dates, but with a few exceptions since I read several at once, some sit on the back burner brewing for awhile, a few (not many) from the end of last year. This is what is driving the average up when it's mixing it all together. I'm especially slow with anthologies.

Thank you. I see it in your Sheet now. (I totally missed your signature line earlier.)

Your Sheet is great, so much detail. More than I've ever wanted or needed to track and I've been accused of tracking too much. (No such thing of course. )

Spoiler:

I really want to introduce you to the ARRAYFORMULA function in Sheets though. It can save SO many formulas and pain points (although it does have some limitations and some functions won't work with it.)

As an example of what it can do, try deleting the values in column AA on your 2021 tab and then putting this in cell AA1:

={"Days Read";ARRAYFORMULA(IF(Z2:Z="",,DATEDIF(Y2:Y-1,Z2:Z,"D")))}

That one formula will replace all of the other formulas you have in that column. The downside is that if you want to override a single row it will break and you can't do that. For most things it doesn't look like you do that though.

Another example would be erasing the formulas in Tables!R42:R50 and putting this in cell R42:

=ARRAYFORMULA(COUNTIF('2021'!Q:Q,L42:L50))

And if your sheet was formatted different (all years on the same tab) the QUERY function would be WONDERFUL for some of what you are doing. As-is, it still might be cool for some things. For example, try putting this in a blank tab:

=QUERY('2021'!Z2:AG,"Select Year(Z), Count(AG) where Z is not null group by Year(Z)",0)

If you had all years in the same tab you could easily get a list of all states read in all years with a single formula.

Admittedly, you could get close to that now, it's just not quite as easy. This will get the 2019 through 2021 tabs:

=QUERY({'2019'!Z2:AG;'2020'!Z2:AG;'2021'!Z2:AG},"S elect Col8, Count(Col8) where Col1 is not null and Col8 is not null group by Col8 pivot Year(Col1)",0)

This wouldn't let you group 2011-2015 or 2016-2017 like you've done now though.

[Paperbackstash]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Thank you. I see it in your Sheet now. (I totally missed your signature line earlier.)

Your Sheet is great, so much detail. More than I've ever wanted or needed to track and I've been accused of tracking too much. (No such thing of course. )

Thank you, I am still learning with all of it! I will check out your formula recommendations to make things easier. I'm in the process of still shifting stuff around. Appreciate the compliment on it, it's enjoyable to work on but sort of all over the place right now.

[Paperbackstash]

Audible finally sucked me back in with a good deal when I had some extra money around; the 99.00 for premium plus yearly membership and the 12 credits at once. I used two credits for the 2 for 1 sale and received 4 books, but not interested in others in the sale enough. Bought a few audio favorites I'd like as keepers to re-listen to off and on over the years in the future, and some random. Couldn't resist spending most of the credits, but have some left over, and can listen to a lot of the originals that are short, that I missed from previous membership and looked forward to each month with the plus catalog.

[Byrdie]

My main goal was small compared to previous years but as of now I am 7 books behind. Health problems of my own, other family issues including Mom's heart condition finally getting the better of her near the end of February and trying to settle her affairs just left me too drained for anything remotely resembling leisure time. When I was able to make the effort just last week, my faithful Kobo Aura H20 suffered from battery and SD card failure, leaving me with just a very old tablet on which to try and read. Needless to say, it is not going so good. The thing barely functions, takes nearly forever to charge, and is giving me eyestrain even worse than when I was using it regularly back 5 or 6 years ago. No idea when I'll catch up, that said I am not ready to call quits on this year's challenge.

[issybird]

I’m sorry your’re in such a rough patch, Byrdie, and about your mom’s death.

[Byrdie]

Thanks. Right now I'm hanging in there and hoping for better days.

[Paperbackstash]

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss and all you're going through.

[Uncle Robin]

My revised goal StoryGraph goal of 200 books is looking safe now that I'm about to finish book 102 with April barely half done. If I can have a month for each of the 4 non-English books on my TBR, this sprint start will have been worthwhile.