Reading Challenge 2012

Last year I signed up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge which you can read about here and here. I challenged myself to read 50 books in 2011. I read a lot, and I kept seeing people online who were going for 100, comparatively 50 seemed quite doable. Clearly I had not done the math! Who are these people reading 100 books a year? If you stop to think about it (which clearly I didn't) it's almost a book a week, all year! Unfortunately my competitive instinct was more highly honed than my cognitive ability.

Goodreads clearly understands that many of us do not meet our goal and so they conveniently allow you to "update" your goal as the year goes on. Yes, come July you can downgrade the number of books you're challenging yourself to read. How ridiculous, you can just move the goal post so you too can feel like a winner! I didn't do this and so the site helpful reminded me all year that I was hovering around 20% behind my goal. Perhaps what's truly crazy is the need to challenge myself to read x number of books in one year and, despite complaining, to return to do  the same the next year!

I read 36 books last year and I'm hoping to read at least 40 this year. The challenge certainly made me think about my reading,  and I enjoyed keeping a catalogue of what I had read. The greatest benefit of the challenge is as a mnemonic device. Frankly I've forgotten half the books I read last year. Which raised the question, do books "count" if you can't even remember them?