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By Rhys Pearce
I have been an avid consumer of books since I was first taught to read, but in 2020 I experimented with that reading for the first time. Having recently received a reading log, which allowed me to record some details about each book I read with a little space for a review, which had exactly 100 slots, I challenged myself to fill it in in just one year. Like many people, I have had a massive backlog of books for as long as I can remember, with so much to read and yet so little time. I thought that if I set myself the goal of 100 books, I could make significant progress through it and eventually get to the end of them. Looking back from where I sit in 2021, I can’t say I’d do it again.
The first step was to figure out how much reading 100 books actually is. Eventually, I settled on two books a week, which works out to 104 books over the year, and allows a small margin of error. Initially, everything went very smoothly: 2 books each week gives you 3.5 days per book, which I rounded down to 3 in case I needed more time later in the year. The first 7 books were completed within that short timeframe, but I began to lag a little towards the end of January. American Psycho and Midnight’s Children took 8 and 13 days to read respectively, which put me slightly behind where I wanted to be as February began. This didn’t particularly worry me, however, as the next month of books were read more quickly, reversing my position to a slight lead by the start of March.
Of course, March of 2020 was no ordinary month, as by the end of it the pandemic had begun to be taken seriously by the western world, and I, as a UK resident, was in lockdown. This meant I had even more time to dedicate to reading, keeping just a little ahead of where I needed to be until mid-April. Here, the first cracks started to show. Dracula, which I began on the 14th, took me 8 months and 9 days to read, the slowest time of anything I read in 2020. Personally, it really bothers me to start a new book before I finish the previous one, so up until now I hadn’t done so. Yet, in the first few pages of Dracula, I was already falling asleep, and I could tell it was going to be a long haul. The next day, I read No One Writes To the Colonel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ shortest work, in just one day, and I began to understand the problem with my plan.
Marquez is, in my opinion, one of the greatest writers to have ever graced my bookshelves. If he is not my absolute favourite, he’s definitely in the top 5. Yet as I got to the end of No One Writes To the Colonel, where Marquez’ slow-paced books usually come into their own, I wasn’t sure I had really enjoyed what I had just read. I gave it a 7/10 – not a bad score - but something was still bothering me, and later in the year I finally realised what it was. I hadn’t chosen No One Writes because it was the next book I wanted to read, but because it was the easiest to get through at just 69 pages, giving me extra time to get through Dracula without having to start something bigger. That’s not how I ever wanted to treat books: reading has always been my passion, and yet this goal had begun to turn it into a chore, something I only did because I had convinced myself I needed to.
But at the time, I still hadn’t realised any of this, and continued on in a similar way. The next book was Suspicious Minds, a Stranger Things spin-off I had originally bought as a mild fan of the show. Now though, I chose it not because I wanted to revisit the scene of early 80s Indiana, but because I thought it would be easy to get through, adding to the free time I’d need to eventually return to Dracula. This time, I was wrong, and it actually took me 4 days, just over my self-imposed time limit. That meant I still couldn’t finish Dracula, and would have to keep forcing myself through things as fast as possible to have any hope of getting extra time. You would hope that this new sense of urgency would’ve let me race through my next few books, helping with my original goal of getting through my backlog, but counter-intuitively, it didn’t.
To read, I had to be relaxed and focused, and the pressure I felt to keep reading only made me want to stop. Several times, when reading a book my mind would become enthralled in the pages I had left, and unable to stop dividing it every which way I could to devise how many pages I had to read on each day for the fastest finishing time, I literally could no longer read the words. This only made it more stressful, as I had to make it through books at a snail’s pace, taking 5 days to get through the script of The Duchess of Malfi. The prospect of returning to Dracula only got further and further away.
Over the summer, things only got more stressful. Unable to finish Marquez’ the Autumn of the Patriarch, I added another deadline: to finish all his books before my birthday. I admit, I did get through a lot of books fairly quickly, but often I chose them specifically because they were short, which meant that they didn’t come from the backlog of books I had initially wanted to get through. At this point, I was only treading water, adding another book to the backlog every time I finished one. And the stress kept building, ultimately making me take a month to finish a book of Scottish Fairy Tales. But the worst point came in early July, when my Mom noticed I had stopped reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury to get through a mindless graphic novel I had picked up ages ago. By this point, I honestly thought I might not get through 100 books, and that prospect absolutely crushed me. Reading was always the thing I thought myself best at, my hidden talent which improved so many other of the skills I tried to develop. Yet, now that I had finally tested my ability, it seemed like I would prove a fraud.
In the end, I enjoyed both the graphic novel and Sound and the Fury when I finished it six months later, but the stress I had from stopping one to read the other only detracted from my enjoyment of both. Actually, just saying I “enjoyed” the Sound and the Fury is an understatement. While the prose of the first two chapters can initially seem meaningless, they only make the overall book so much more meaningful, once you finally reach the end. The slow pace and cryptic themes reminded me of my favourite book, 100 Years of Solitude, which I had read about a month before starting my 100 book goal. But what if I hadn’t discovered it until 2020? Would I have been able to appreciate it if I was reading as fast as I could, or if I had read the second half months after starting the first? Or would I have a different opinion on my favourite book of all time? Would I, like a lot of people do, consider it too extravagant, long-winded, and ultimately pointless? I don’t know.
So what’s the point of all this? What’s the point of that hypothetical if I simply don’t know? Well, I read a lot of great books in 2020, and quite a few of them took a while to get going. Dune. The Three Musketeers. Love in the Time of Cholera. Maybe I should’ve given them the time and attention they need to flourish in my imagination. Maybe one day, I will. As we head into 2021, I’m hoping not to make the same mistakes. My reading goal for this year isn’t to read a certain amount, it’s to improve my reading habits: to be able to read any book I want, even supremely long ones, without being afraid of how long it takes. And honestly, I’m hoping to forget my To Be Read backlog. Just because I bought a book doesn’t mean I eventually have to read it. Sure, that mean a waste of money, but if you read a book so long after you bought it that you’re no longer the person you were back then, and that it no longer appeals to you, isn’t that a waste of time? In short, my reading resolution for 2021 is to not miss the words for the pages: to not get so focused on the process of reading that I forget why I`m doing it in the first place.
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