Sometime in December a blurb about the Popsugar Reading Challenge came across my internet, and I thought that might be a fun thing to do. I started looking at the prompts for 2019…and then realized that I have dozens and dozens of books in my very own home that I picked up because I wanted to read them and have never gotten around to.
So I decided instead of doing the Popsugar challenge, I would create my own 2019 reading list. I decided on 50 books, because it’s a nice round number and even though it’s mostly a book a week, there’s a little wiggle room there so I don’t feel quite so pressured to absolutely beyond a doubt finish a book per week. Since I almost always have at least three books going at once (one in the car that I read at lunch, one on my nightstand to read before bed, and one on the couch to read whenever), trying to finish one per week doesn’t really fit with my reading style, but I can see myself trying to conform to that deadline and being miserable about it.
It was really, really hard to pick just 50, and I’m still second guessing myself on a couple. I probably have enough left to do another 50 in 2020, and that’s not counting the books I will inevitably pick up during the year (I’m only buying one book for this list, and it’s a book I’d already decided to buy before I knew I was going to be doing this). You can see what I ended up with at the bottom of this post.
I’m tracking everything with a modified version of this spreadsheet from BookRiot, which allows me to pretty easily drill down and get some fun data. For instance, even though I did not plan it this way at all and just grabbed the books I most wanted to read, the list is split right down the middle into fiction and non-fiction. I’m planning to read 16612 pages this year. The shortest book I’m planning to read is 128 pages (Jessica Jones: Alias Vol. 2), and the longest is 901 pages (The Crimson Petal and the White). Eventually I’ll be able to see what my pages per day average is and cool stuff like that (okay, maybe it’s only “cool” if you’re a data geek like me, but I’m loving it).
And here are my guidelines, such as they are. I very much do not want this to be a source of stress for me, so there aren’t many:
- Read books in any order.
- Books that I don’t want to finish for whatever reason must be replaced if I’m less than halfway done, and may be replaced if I’m more than halfway done.
- Finally, this is not a race. There is no punishment for not finishing all of the books. They will still be there for me to read if I don’t get to all of them this year.
Happy reading, everyone!
