The 2015 Annual Reading Challenge Discussion Thread

[issybird]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Oh dear. No, pay it no mind! Reading Challenges should be fun, not a worry!

Thanks! I admit it, I start feeling more comfortable once I have a cushion.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by issybird

Thanks! I admit it, I start feeling more comfortable once I have a cushion.

Me too. It felt good when I built up a margin of 8 or 9 books, even though I finished up reading 4 more than my goal.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I keep my TBR in by calibre database, with the use of a custom column, 'Read'. Yes for one's I've read, No for books on my TBR, and indeterminate on freebies that I don't really want to read in the near future, but that I have 'just in case'.

Books read I move to a separate library. It helps keep library size manageable. I find Calibre is slow switching between large libraries. So far I have 5 libraries but will soon need to split again.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Books read I move to a separate library. It helps keep library size manageable. I find Calibre is slow switching between large libraries. So far I have 5 libraries but will soon need to split again.

I only have one library, but use the tabs feature to have 'unread' and 'bought' sub-libraries.

I have around 5000 or so books, but I haven't noticed any performance problems.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I only have one library, but use the tabs feature to have 'unread' and 'bought' sub-libraries.

I have around 5000 or so books, but I haven't noticed any performance problems.

The slowdowns occur when switching between libraries which is probably why you may not notice. Unfortunately, I started using Calibre after accumulating many titles and it would take me many many hours now to add tags to each title. And I would still need to take the time to update my Goodreads account and post on MR.

[Quake1028]

I should use Calibre, but I don't have the time and/or the patience right now to learn how to use it like I probably should, so I keep putting it off.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quake1028

I should use Calibre, but I don't have the time and/or the patience right now to learn how to use it like I probably should, so I keep putting it off.

I wanted something like calibre for ages. But then it took me a couple of years to actually start using it properly, because I'd got used to manually organising my ebooks.

When I did use start using it, I found that I had about 300 more unread ebooks than I had thought I had!

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by Quake1028

I should use Calibre, but I don't have the time and/or the patience right now to learn how to use it like I probably should, so I keep putting it off.

It actually doesn't take long to learn how to use. What might be time consuming are any tweaks you might want to make outside of the many plugins that are now available for it.

It really is a helpful piece of software!

[Dngrsone]

My problem is multi-booting, primarily Amazon purchases and the associated DRM problem.

I have to boot into Windows to download my Amazon books so I can strip the DRM for backup (sorry, Amazon, don't trust you guys to always have my book there; besides, I spend a lot of time offline) because I use Linux as my primary OS and can't seem to get the DRM add-on to work from within Mint KDE.

[Red Falcon]

Originally Posted by Red Falcon

I have two goals for 2015:

1. Read more of the books that have been sitting on my kindle/phone since 2012.
2. Read at least 40 books this year including 5 classics off my audible account.

Since I started keeping track of my reading again in 2012 I have averaged 40-45 books a year not including the piles of Short Stories I consumed.

1.Island of Dr Moreau - knocks off one on my classics goal
2.The Oracle of Stamboul - knocks off one of my 2012 goal

Currently listening to The Engines of Gods.

[sun surfer]

I barely made my challenge last year and read a lot at the last minute, so I took a few days off before I came up with my 2015 challenge:

Spoiler:

I decided to go back to counting books (instead of only pages) for the overall only because of goodreads, since you are only allowed to have a challenge by number of books there. It’s the first year I’m participating there from the beginning of the year and I didn’t want one challenge there and one here, so there you go, but I am adding more to it here. Last year I did two half-year challenges and loved it, but I am going back to a full-year challenge for the main challenge, for the exact same reason - the goodreads challenge that I want to have synced to this challenge - but my subchallenges will still be half-year.

What I discovered last year is that I really loved subchallenges with themes mostly rather than a list of specific books. It narrows things down to help me focus on some of the kinds of books I want to read during the year without being too specific. When I chose a list of specific books in years past I sometimes felt like I was forced to read those books during the year whether I felt like it or not, whereas with a theme, such as say English Classic, I can still have the freedom to make a choice of which exact book to read when I’m about to read it. Though, I’ve still picked a few specific books too.

The last half-year I gave myself subchallenges that totalled 13 books (less if two themes overlapped) and I found it difficult. If I read 50 books a year now, that’s about 25 a half-year, so already 13 is more than half my reading for a half-year. But then, add in the book clubs I participate in. It depends on the selections, but for instance last July through December I read 9 book club selections. Add that to 13 subchallenge books and you can see that I hardly had any time left over for random picks during the last six months (though I did squeeze some in!…but that’s what led to me having to rush to finish my subchallenges in December ).

So, it’s not a huge lessening but I limited my subchallenge books to 10 this first half-year of January through June, and I hope it won’t be too hard for me. The only differences from last year is that, except for book count, page count, reviews and posts which are all-inclusive, I’m not allowing cross-over books (even if a book can count for two subchallenge themes, it will only get counted for one) and a book must be at least 100 pages to count for a subchallenge theme (I can’t bother enforcing that rule for the main challenge though for many reasons but mainly because goodreads will count everything I list as a book read regardless, because I want to list everything I read together without any worries or exceptions and because I read enough really long books to even out any short stories counted as a “book”). I had one instance of each last year - one book counted in two subchallenges and one short story that counted for a subchallenge book - and while I was fine with it, in both I felt like I didn’t get as much out of those subchallenges as I meant to in the beginning, hence the change this year.

Without further ado:

Main Challenge:

• 50 Books in 2015 - It’s a nice even number and it should be a little bit of a challenge for me without being too rough. Before last year 50 would’ve been really tough, but I began listening to audiobooks as well which is really upping my numbers. I managed 51 books according to goodreads in 2014 including the audiobooks.

Subchallenges January-June:

• 8,000 Pages - Sneaky me! I made books my main challenge but snuck in pages for a subchallenge. Sh, don’t tell anyone, but this is what I’m really focusing on. I’ve been slowly upping this number each successive challenge. First half of 2014 it was 4,000, second half of 2014 it was 6,000. It’s a terrible leap of the imagination but I went with 8,000 this time. I easily surpassed both those numbers last year, mainly because of the addition of audiobooks. I’m still trying to figure out my sweet spot with all those added audio “pages”, but both half years in 2014 I went above 9,000 pages. Maybe I should make my subchallenge 9,000 pages or higher but I figure I don’t want to stress myself out and so for now 8,000 is a nice number to shoot for. If I need to read 25 books for this first half-year to stay on track, that equals 320 pages per book for 8,000 pages which seems reasonable. P.S. - Yes I count audiobooks as pages read. For now, I don’t want to have separate challenges for eye-read books and ear-read books; I want things simple with everything together. After all, I consider everything as a book read. For both, I calculate pages read the same way - I look at the goodreads page with all editions of the book and average together the first five different reasonable page count results.
  
• 3 Club Nominees - I’ve had this subchallenge, slightly varied, each of the last two half-years and I loved it so I’m continuing it. This is any nomination from either the Mobileread Book Club or the MR Literary Club that doesn’t win during the months of January through June 2015.
  
• 2 Print Pile - I’ve done a good job of reading through my print pile of books over the last years, though I’ll admit it probably wasn’t as huge as some of yours. I’m not a huge buyer/hoarder of unread books so my stack was about maybe 25 or so at its highest. Now I’m down to four, and what a four they are. I should really just give them up as I’m not hugely interested in them anymore, but I’ve been determined to read through this stack, and with these as the final four, I just really want to read them to finish the last of my print pile rather than finishing it by giving these away. I’ve read through all my fiction and the nonfiction I’m most interested in, and so these four nonfiction books are business and finance related, and two are rather dry and long (600 and 800 pages) while the other two are shorter pop marketing books. It’s ironic that I bought all these to learn more on the subjects for specific reasons and I didn’t read them then and here I am determined to read them when they may not particularly enlighten me much anymore (or is it not ironic? my brain hurts). Anyway, I figure, if I read two this half-year, maybe I can read two the next half-year and finish my print pile in 2015. That depends though on which two I pick this time. If I pick the two easier and shorter ones, I may only give myself one of the harder ones for July-December.
  
• 1 Partially Read - I originally wanted two but had to cut back to keep my subchallenges to only 10 books. I have a shelf on goodreads of books I’ve partially read and since I rarely ever leave off reading a book anymore (none in the last year though I have a few in the last few years for various reasons) I’d love to get it down to zero. It’s at eight at the moment and unless I remember any I’ve forgotten about or leave off reading any books in the future, it’s well within reach to have this group of books completely read within the next few years. Of course I’d love to just go ahead and put all eight as a subchallenge at once but a) that’d make a list of specific titles for my subchallenge which I don’t want and b) I have other things I want as subchallenges as well. So I’ll just have to live with whittling this down by one for now.
  
• 1 Irish - I did an Irish challenge last half-year and I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the English Classic challenge but I have too many new subchallenges I wanted to add this time and so am lucky to squeeze in even one Irish book. I’m already eyeing one in particular - Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle - but there are a few other options too and more may come up so we’ll see.
  
• 1 Tome - I’m excited about this one. By tome, I mean any really long book. I’ve been wanting to read one of the ones I’ve had my eye on for awhile but, mainly because of subchallenges and book club reads, and extra reading time that I decided to spend on less demanding reads, I haven’t been able to, so I’m adding this as a subchallenge to get one in. My guess is that I’ll choose either Don Quixote or Les Miserables. There are some even more ambitious books I’d like to read, say In Search of Lost Time or Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but those may be too much for me for now. I should fess up that I did manage to read (listen to) the tome Bleak House last year as part of my English Classic subchallenge (and it was also a partially read book too that I finally finished, hurrah), but otherwise I don’t have a subchallenge that any of these would fit into, so I made a separate one for them.
  
• 1 Young Americana (Little Women) - Why is this not simply reading Little Women without a specialised theme? Well, because I originally meant this to encompass three particular books I’d never read - Little Women, Tom Sawyer and Little House in the Big Woods (i.e. Little House on the Prairie #1). I loved my Irish and English challenges so much last year and while I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird in December I thought about other American classics featuring young protagonists that I’ve never read before. Putting two and two together, I came up with the idea for a subchallenge where I would read these three and catch up a bit. Unfortunately, reality struck and I am determined to keep these subchallenges under that 10 book total limit, so this one took the biggest hit. Little Women though is what I most wanted to read so I kept it even though it’s the longest of the three. Yes, the other two are short I know but a limit is a limit and I don’t want to add two more challenge books this half-year. I may just read them anyway, or I may not (I want to read so many other things too!). I kept the challenge title though as a reminder to me, because I found last year that just constantly seeing these subchallenges keeps books that fit them in my mind as strong possibilities even when I’m choosing a random book to read.
  
• The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor - This is the third in a travel trilogy of a specific journey by an English author who travelled across Europe on foot when he was young in the 1930’s, though he wrote about it when he was much older. He is a beautiful writer and very learned and literary, and this last book was published posthumously in 2013 because he never quite finished it. I read the first two last year and fell in love with them and so definitely want to read this one soon. It is a challenging read though and to be savoured so it’s not the kind of thing you just pick up and read in an afternoon, and I was worried that if it wasn’t a subchallenge I might not have the temerity to choose it as one of my random reads.
  
• 6 Goodreads Written Reviews - Sounds easy, but I've only made one total so far ever. There is no length limit - a review can be as short as one word. I've been wanting to start writing short reviews on books I read for awhile now. Six should be around a fourth or so of what I read this half-year and would be basically one per month.
  
• Post-Read Club Replies - Sometimes I've read a book club book then never posted on it, so my challenge is to make at least one post per book club selection if and after I've finished reading it for this half-year.

Estimating and guessing at page counts, these subchallenge books may add up to a little less than 4,000 pages (with the tome taking up almost a quarter of that). That’d be almost half my 8,000 pages so hopefully a good balance and not too big a chunk of my overall reading.

[HomeInMyShoes]

@sun surfer: I enjoyed Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha. Roddy Doyle is one of my fall back authors when I'm not sure what to read. I think my favorite of his is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. I do need to branch out with Irish authors though. I've only read three Irish authors so far.

[sun surfer]

I haven't read any Doyle yet so this would be my first and thanks for the rec on his other title HIMS. Some of the other Irish authors I've been interested in are Jamie O'Neill, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Tomás Ó Crohan.

I'm really enjoying catching up with Irish authors in the last couple of years. Joyce's Ulysses has been one of my two Irish favourites so far despite its difficulty and the other is the short story Guests of a Nation by Frank O'Connor, highly recommended. Also thought Joyce's Dubliners was great as was O'Connor's short story collection My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (it has some hilarious parts, doubly impressive for its age). And then two very different O'Briens - Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls was good but not great, a little memoir-esque slice of mid-20th-century sensitive rural Irish schoolgirl life, and I feel the same about Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds which I just finished a little over a week ago - technically creative and impressive and also funny but no Joyce (who partially influenced him - it seemed to me like a large part of the style was a response to/a skewering of/a partial imitation of Joyce).

[HomeInMyShoes]

For Irish:
James Joyce: Ulysses; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
David Livingstone: The Geographical Tradition (non-fiction)
Roddy Doyle: The Van; The Snapper; The Commitments; Two Pints; The Woman Who Walked into Doors; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

I need to branch out a little more. I'll definitely look through the authors you mentioned.

[BelleZora]

^
Guests of a Nation by Frank O'Connor is one of the most powerful short stories I've ever read. Still haunts me.