Back in 2006, I started setting reading goals for myself. I was a year into my new major (professional writing after time as a natural science major, a chemical engineering major, then a microbiology major) and looking for ways to get my creative mind back on track. That year, I set myself a goal of 50 books and 15,000 pages. I met both goals, and I’ve been doing it every since (tweaking the numbers every year of course). But lately I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t do more. Not particularly for any big reason—mostly because I like making lists and checking off goals (hence my Day Zero project, then my 100 Days of Writing experiment).

I started looking for other challenges, to see if any sounded appealing. What I found (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), is that my particular brand of goal-setting neuroses is nothing compared to some people. There’s a book a day challenge (seriously, people have done this), a challenge to read books you “should have read in high school,” a challenge to read a book by authors whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet, and tons of others (Goodreads has a whole section for this). Then there are the writing goals: NaNoWriMo (and its many offshoots), the Inkygirl word count challenge, and the entire #writegoal group on Twitter.

Some of it seems a bit much to me (though I suppose I’m not really one to talk), but I’m also interested in the idea of having goals to push you along. Especially when those goals are of such a nature that you are responsible to no one but yourself for completing them (or not completing them, or lying about completing them, etc.). Does anyone else use goals for motivation and/or accountability? Does setting a goal affect your outcome? I know for me I’d read just as much without my Excel spreadsheet tracking every book, but the Day Zero and 100 Days of Writing stuff I did (am doing) really helped to amp up my productivity—something I believe I was fully capable of without the pre-set challenge, but that helped make it more fun in the meantime.

Hello. My name is Kathryn Houghton, and I enjoy non-literary genres. In the past few years, I have read the following books:

• Harry Potter (YA fantasy, 7 books plus three others mentioned in the series)
• The Wheel of Time (adult fantasy, 14 books, plus an encyclopedia, with one more book forthcoming)
• Mistborn (adult fantasy, 3 books)
• The Hunger Games (YA fantasy, 3 books)
• The DaVinci Code; Angels and Demons (adult fiction, probably closest to mystery)
• The Abhorsen Trilogy (YA fantasy, 3 books)
• The Sword of Truth (adult fantasy, 11 books)
• The Other Boleyn Girl (adult historical fiction, probably leaning toward women’s fiction)
• The Inheritance Cycle (YA fantasy, 3 books, with one more forthcoming)
• What-the-Dickens (YA fiction/fantasy, one of those story-within-a-story things, sort of folktale-esque)
• The Wicked books (adult fiction/fantasy, though I still contend that the first book, at the very least, is literary)
• His Dark Materials (YA fantasy, 3 books)

Okay, I’ll stop there because a comprehensive list would be too long, even if I limit myself to books read in the last five years. And here’s the thing. This isn’t a confession because I’m trying to reform (though I do try to balance my reading habits among a number of features). Nor do I need, or want, a support group. Instead I’m here to make a case for these poor books that so often get left behind in literary circles. They’re called trash, junk. And when we do read them, we call them guilty pleasures, as if they’re bad habits, in need of some type of justification. This has got to stop. Read more »

Tagging along with Kathryn’s musings on what makes a reader a reader, this morning I found the results of Central Connecticut State University’s annual study on reading in the country’s 75 largest cities. There’s some interesting data there, especially if you dive in and look at their different categories.

Washington, DC, turned out in the top spot this year, unseating Seattle, which had won or shared the top spot for four out of five years. Portland also ranked in the top ten, so I’d say having both northwest cities that qualify for the list sitting that high is a good sign.

But what really intrigues me is not the list itself, but the categories, and I found a number of surprising things, such as while Washington, DC, is the overall most literate cities, it ranks just 17th on the list in number of bookstores per 10k people.
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So the other day I was in Barnes and Noble for the typical post-holiday-gift-card-shopping, with my girlfriend, who is a big nonfiction reader. I was standing with her while she was looking at the pitifully small memoirs and essays section, and I noticed that, next to this nonfiction section, was a (relatively?) new section for Barnes and Noble. The section title, I shit you not, was Teen Paranormal Romance. As seperate, apparently, from young adult books and from romance books. The Teen Paranormal Romance section at Barnes and Noble is at least twice as large as the essays and memoirs section. She was sad, and I tried to put on a brave face and give a little mini-speech about market forces, but really, inside I was crying. Obviously, this is all because of Twilight.
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Those writing goals I’ve talked about the last two weeks have gotten me thinking: What is it that makes a reader? We’ve all heard the depressing stats in the past few years about how little we, as a people, read. (Here are a few studies/sources: 1, 2, 3.) There’s some evidence that e-readers and e-books are turning this trend around, but on the whole, we’re still a country much more likely to surf the Internet, play a video game (angry birds, anyone?), or watch television than we are to open up a book. So what then separates those of us that do make reading a regular occurrence? At what point did we take a different path than others? Or is some of it nature as opposed to the proverbial nurture? I’ve got my own opinions, but I’m curious to hear what others think. And here, for your mental pondering, is what I consider to be my own path toward becoming an avid reader. Read more »

As promised, here is the abridged version of my 2010 reading awesomeness (or not-so-awesomeness, since I didn’t meet any of my goals, not even the mini ones I set for myself last week). To save you all the trouble of scrolling, I’ll be putting the full version in my personal blog.

Top Five New Reads (in no particular order)

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides
This book, told in the first person plural, had me from the first page. Unfortunately, I started reading it right before class and so had to put it down around page twelve or so, but when I picked it up again the next day I found I was unable to put it down. Though the five sisters’ suicides are revealed right at the top of the book, no tension is lost as the reader watches the unnamed narrators (the neighborhood boys) watch the events unfold. I’m a fast reader, but also a highly distracted one, and so it was rare that I read this book in essentially one sitting, though it would not be the only book I read this way in 2010.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
The other was the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy, though I considered using Mockingjay, the final book of the trilogy (which was actually published in 2010) for this list instead. These dystopian young adult novels follow the story of Katniss Everdeen, a teenaged girl who volunteers to take her sisters place in The Hunger Games, a government sponsored event in which children between the ages of twelve and eighteen are forced to fight to the death while the entire nation watches on television. The plot certainly does its part in driving these books, but what truly shines is the complexity of Katniss herself, the many places she breaks away from being like all those other YA (and even adult) heroines. Something about these books stuck with me, in an almost haunting way, for weeks after I’d put them down.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The story of an immigrant couple and their American-born son, every time I talk about The Namesake, I find myself being drawn to big, overarching statements about the reach of this book, or at least about what I think it should be. It—and Lahiri herself—somehow feels that important to me. Perhaps it’s the shape of the book, which covers something like forty years in under three hundred pages (and still develops both complex characters and situations without ever crossing the line into cheap melodrama), but something still feels bigger to me. I feel like a reread of this book would yield as much as the initial read.

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With the end of 2010 approaching, I’m frantically trying to finish up a few last minute books so that I can add them to my reading totals for this year. This is the fifth year I’ve both set goals for yearly reading and tracked my progress, and it looks to be the fourth year running that I’ll fall short of hitting the number of books I set out to read (but only the second year I’ll miss my goal of total pages). Assuming I finish the three books I’ve been working on, I’ll finish 2010 with 42 unique books: 10 books shy of my goal of a book each week. (As a bit of an obsessive rereader, I won’t count a book twice if I happen to read it twice in one year, which I did with some of my thesis books. Instead, I usually plan my rereads so that they fall in successive calendar years for the sole purpose of being able to count them twice on my list. There are three books I currently have on hold for this exact reason. Obsessive much?)

My pages goal was maybe even more ambitious, coming in at 20,000 pages. I’m anticipating missing this by around 1500 or so. According to the fancy spreadsheet I set up way back in the day, this is still something around a 93% success rate, which I figure is a high 3.5 at worst, so I’m trying not to feel too poorly about this.

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I’d never heard of Mockingjay when my Twitter page exploded about its upcoming release last week. I follow mostly writers and publishers, to be sure, but the surge of popularity coupled with my complete ignorance left me feeling like the odd one out—like the only one who didn’t know what a Tamagotchi was while the rest of the school fed and played with their virtual pets. (Tangent: There’s probably a better simile to be had there, but do you remember those?!) For those that don’t know, I will share my new found knowledge: Mockingjay is the final book in The Hunger Games Trilogy, which is another one of those young adult series that has found just as many—if not more—adult readers—than child ones.

Had you mentioned a book called The Hunger Games to me I would have said, “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of it, maybe,” but I couldn’t have told you the first thing about it. But on Thursday, despite my lingering state of unemployment, I bought a copy. Then I came home, turned to page one, and started reading. Three-and-a-half hours (and one nasty migraine) later, after telling myself twenty times I would read just one more chapter, it was one thirty in the morning and I had just finished the book. Read more »

Despite the outcry earlier this year about the uselessness of Twitter after the Library of Congress announced it would be archiving every tweet, Twitter is still around and kicking, and users are finding new uses for it almost every day. Want to use it to find a job? Forbes will tell you how. Want to join a book club? Picador has one for you. Want to find new books to hopefully replace those your child is obsessed with so that you can read a new bedtime story for once? Well, you’ll have to talk to Susan Orlean for that one.

Last week New Yorker author Susan Orlean turned to Twitter in search of books to replace her son’s cherished “Magic Treehouse” books, asking her 65,000+ followers to suggest books for her five-and-a-half-year old using the hashtag #booksthatchangekidsworlds. She then posted a few hundred of these suggestions in an article on the New Yorker website. Not all the books on there are age appropriate, or readily inspire the image of a mother-son pair curled up in bed enjoying a quick story (I don’t know about you but the dictionary was never on my bedtime reading list). Still, looking through the titles brought me back a bit to my own childhood. Frog and Toad, anyone? Or perhaps The Boxcar Children. There’s a copy of The Little Prince on my bookshelf right now.

I’m in the middle of a packing frenzy at the moment—I leave two days after graduation, spend four days driving across the country, then get on a plane for Europe the very next day—so I don’t have any real insights to offer today. Instead, I have a few fun questions. Think of it as holiday fun.

1.   What fictional character would you be most excited to meet?
2.   What fictional character would you be most terrified to meet?
3.   What literary world would you choose to live in?
4.   What movie was better than the book?
5.   What books are you embarrassed to admit you’ve never read?
6.   What books are you embarrassed to admit you have read?