Last year, I decided I would try to read 52 books in 2014.
Here's my progress from Goodreads!
As you can probably tell, I didn't keep up with it super well. I have fifteen books left to read! Fifteen! Here's my plan of attack and some suggestions if you're behind, too:
1. Read younger books. I have a boatload of middle grade books that I've been meaning to read. They're about 200 pages each, meaning I could speed through them in about an hour and a half to two hours.
2. Read Smaller Books. My Book Outlet Black Friday sale order just came in and to my surprise, a lot of the books were smaller. Granted, they're probably harder to read than any middle grade I own. So, I'm going to have to devote more time to them.
3. For the longer books, set out specific times to read in your schedule. I don't own any audio books and probably shouldn't go out and buy them for books I already own. So, I can't read when I'm driving or doing other things. However, my kindle does have a text-to-speech option. While it's not the best way to go about reading for me, it will work when I'm wrapping presents. Sometimes, I need something to calm me down before I go to sleep. This is the prime opportunity to read, too!
4. Divide books into manageable pieces. First, you need to know how long it will take you to read a book.* I may have a hard time reading a book for a two hour stretch. But I know that I want to read them in a day or two. So, I divide the page numbers in half and there-you-go! About 100-150 pages to read in two sittings. It doesn't sound that hard!
5. Finally, the hardest one of all: committing to read those books. During the rest of this year, I guess I got scared away by the fact that I had fallen behind in my challenge. My friend was climbing on the number of books that she had read and I felt entirely guilty. I just hadn't forced myself through those few months of inactivity. That's going to change for this last half of December. I can push through this. I know it.
*This is a good website to see how fast you read. I would recommend taking a few of the tests and averaging out your score. A typical page has 250 words. So, to see how long it will take you to read the book, multiply the number of pages in the book by 250 to get the word count. Then, divide the number of words by how fast you read and finally, divide that by 60 to get the hours. So, say I want to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. There are 418 pages, so: 418 pages*250 = 104, 500. Next, multiply that by how fast you can read. For me, I can read about 569 wpm: 104, 500 words/569 wpm=184 minutes. Divide that by 60 to get the time in hours and I can say that it will take me about 3 hours to finish it!
For those of you who would like a neat little formula:
w= words you can read per minute
p = the pages in a book
250 =the average number of words per page
60 = the number of minutes in an hour
t= the time it will take you to read the book
(250p/w)/60=t
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