100 books in 12 months

Last June, I started reading for pleasure and never really stopped. After graduating, I started to realize I had stopped reading for enjoyment during college. After an initial goal of 12 books a year was finished in less than two months, I decided to set a more ambitious goal of 100 books in a year. I chose 100 mostly because it sounded nice, without thinking what it would take to get there. To reach the goal, I had to hit pretty high daily and weekly reading quotas. All in all, I was at a pace of 2 books a week and averaging 10-15 hours of reading a week. 

Where did all this time come from? I made it. Pulled it out of the ether. “Father” Time bent the rules for me just this once. In all seriousness though, I turned the majority of my screen time (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram) into reading time. Bought an e-reader that tracks daily reading and blocked off time before bed for the books. I’m satisfied to have achieved something I thought was impossible before. A couple things I learned from the process:

I developed an endurance for thinking through ambiguous subjects 

• I read widely, including books I loved, and books it turned out I couldn’t stand. It allowed me to patiently gather evidence from a range of material I read without getting overwhelmed. Mental models I had going into a book were challenged as new evidence appeared. An example of this was Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun: no spoilers, the place you start and end with this one is very different. 

I recognized patterns of story telling, thoughts, emotions, and saw how scenarios played out 

• The simulation experience of reading lets you build intuition around abstract ideas you couldn’t get otherwise. A great example of this was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun: The Biafran civil war was an abstract puzzle of armed actors and international relationships when I studied it. How it played out intuitively, at least in the fictionalized world Adichie painstakingly created, was something I just had to read about.