About Reading 52 100 more Books a year
Recap 2021
Puuh, what a year. With this global pandemic, there was a lot of time for things you want to do. So I read 104 books (2 Books a week) with a total of 37836 pages. It was mostly a lot of fun but some books did not make it easy for me. I am not a person that writes reviews, but I want to highlight my 3 favorite books this year:
- Furchtbare Juristen by Ingo Müller. A book on the German justice system and its role in the crimes of the Third Reich
- Hologrammatica by Tom Hillenbrand. A consistently gripping Sci-Fi Thriller that has it all: Mind Uploading, AI, and a missing person case.
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. A not-so-classic tale of friendship, family, and war from a new perspective.
Recap 2020
I set out less than a year ago with the goal to read more books. Starting with one book a week, I soon upped my goal to 52 and then finally to 65 books. In the end, I read a total of 67 books with a total of 21.000 pages. My favorite books this year were “Narziß und Goldmund” by Herman Hesse and “Sprint”. For 2020 the same goal is set, at least one book a week. To make this a bit more challenging I set my goal to 70 books, we will see how this goes… I am also currently starting a reading circle with some friends to “spread the joy of reading”. Yeah!
2019 in April I had a very late “new years resolution”. Since starting university I was reading only about two books a year. In my room, there was a shelf dedicated to books, but I rarely touched it. So my private little “bookshop” was growing faster than I could read them
The Trigger
Like many evenings I was casually scrolling through Netflix and YouTube when this Video caught my eye. It is one of the best videos I saw in a long time. The video set me back to my childhood where I went to our local library each Saturday to get new books. I also relived the happy evenings of reading till late, caused by an exciting book. It seems like the current “Golden Age of Content” is making it harder and harder for me to read. Of course, I regularly read blogs, news, or other websites. But still, I had to ask myself: ** When was the last time you read a book?**
The Goal
The goal was very basic and simple. Read one book a week, starting now.
My Progress
To be completely honest with you starting was a pain in the ass. I tried different tactics - forcing myself to read 25 pages or half an hour a day. But it was not working well. Too often one book was boring me. One tip from the video was reading multiple books at a time. This was working better now. Even better once I started mixing books about knowledge with regular “fun” reading books.
I went around to my friends and family and ask them all for their favorite books. I entered them all into GoodReads to keep track of them all and so I never run out of books to read.
By lending the books from my friends or checking free bookshelves around the city I do not buy new books very often.
The University Library of KIT offers a lot of books across all topics. If you ask them nicely they will even buy a specific book for you.
To track my progress I use the GoodReads, you can check out my current progress here.
Lessons Learned
Most of the time I still enjoy reading books. By logging my books with GoodReads I can appreciate looking back and checking out the books I read so far.
But sometimes - especially if I do not like a book 100% - I have to force myself to read. I usually challenge myself to read for a specific time (e.g. 1 hour) or a number of pages if I do not like it. But often enough I just start or continue another book. Reading half an hour before going to bed helps me relay immensely.
But the biggest benefit of all: You dive in deep into stories, characters and thoughts. Whether you like them or not every book will give you something in return for reading them.