The Ballad of Reading Goal
The late Amy Krouse Rosenthal, in her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life says the following in her entry for “Completion”: I eat quickly, purposefully, and almost always finish everything on my plate. I finish the meal so I can get to dessert. I finish dessert so I can get up from the table…I find deleting e-mails or messages on my answering machine quite gratifying. I have not experienced the full pleasure of an act or task until I’ve crossed it off my list.” And onward she proceeds, with more and more examples of how the satisfaction of completion equals or exceeds the joy of doing. Of all of the entries in Amy’s Encyclopedia, this entry for “Completion” rang true for me, in almost every particular. The entry describes exactly how I eat, and the motivation behind the speed of my eating. As for keeping lists, I’m less into the pleasure of crossing items off and more into the satisfaction of completing something so that I can add it to one list or another.
Which leads into my annual exercise in setting a goal for reading for the upcoming year. From 1994 through 2006, I managed most years to read roughly a book a week, all meticulously logged. I don’t recall whether I logged my reading simply because of the pleasure of keeping a list or whether I was checking to see if I reached some goal. But beginning in 2007, with my career move from banking to teaching, my annual reading basically doubled, exceeding 100 books each and every year. Once I established this reading rate, I consciously set an annual reading goal of at least 100 books, then evolved to setting a goal of 105 or more books so that I can say to myself or anyone who asks (not that anyone asks) that I average more than 2 books finished per week.
Which leads to the problem…If you combine my love of maintaining a list with the pleasure I take in completing a book and logging it, the end result is that I often take more satisfaction in finishing a book than in reading it. I’ll start a book like Middlemarch, which I did this year, and fret that it’s just too long, forcing me to defer the pleasure of completion and putting my 100+ books per year streak in possible jeopardy. As it turns out, I finished Middlemarch and read 112 other books this past year. Obviously, I didn’t need to worry about my streak, unless I deliberately overcompensated for George Eliot by reading a series of much shorter books to hit my number. In so, so many ways, this is no way to read.
Knowing all this about myself, I’ve thought often over the last few years about setting a far more modest annual reading goal. If I aimed for one book a week, 52 books a year, I’d like to think that I’d slow down and enjoy the reading journey far more. But then I realize that I really don’t race through books. Instead, in my semi-retirement I have so much time available for reading that I pretty much can expect to read 100 books whether I log them or not, whether I set that as a goal or not. And so, I accept the inevitable, and maintain my 105 book goal.
Yet, there’s one mental quirk of mine such that if I could set a reading goal this year, it would be to leave that quirk behind, said quirk being my impatience as I near the end of a book to finish it. I read more than one book at a time, so I’m not in a hurry to finish one book so that I can start another. The impatience seems to be connected to the pleasure I take in listing the completed book in my reading log. When I was a much younger reader, I never wanted a great book to end. The longer the book, the happier I was, since it meant that I could spend more time with the characters and their world. I’d like to have this feeling again. That’s a more satisfying reading goal than completing x books per year, don’t you think?
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