Every year, I generally set two goals: beat 12 video games in a year, and read 12 books in a year. You can see this on my miscellaneous things page. The video game goal is easily overcome every year, but the book-reading goal seems to barely get cleared. This used to always concern me, in the sense that I should be reading more books, but after some thinking, I am perfectly fine with my totals because it is all contextual.

When I take a look at the actual video games that I consider beaten, the amount of time taken varies wildly. I’ve added games that took over 70 hours (i.e. Dragon Quest XI) but I have also added games that took about 1 hour (i.e. A Short Hike). If you look at the 27 games that I considered beaten in 2022, I feel that the true average time for each game would be what many would consider a respectable game length. And many of these games could certainly be extended or omitted if you changed the “beaten” criteria, such as getting the true ending in Hades instead of considering the first clear a win.

So if you look at my list of books read in 2022, there are only 16 complete. Quite a drop, eh? But again, I think the context should not be the quanity of books read, since the length of each book can vary wildly. I could read a lot of books the same length of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and easily surpass my video game total. Or I could break up the short stories of My Man Jeeves from P.D. Wodehouse into 8 separate books. It is easy to fudge these numbers to attain the goal if I wanted.

Instead, we should focus on the amount of time we have read or the amount of pages we have read over the course of the year. Last autumn, I discovered a great app called Serial Reader (which I do pay for because I find it great), which takes public domain books and breaks them down into 10-15 minute volume which you receive on a daily basis. These “chunks” have naturally delineations, typically splitting by chapters or half-chapters. The app takes the daunting idea of reading a whole book and makes it more approachable by focusing on the manageable idea of reading 10-15 minutes every day. (For what it’s worth, I do also juggle a paper book and a Kindle book at all times too.)

This app has admittedly revitalized my reading quite a bit. It has gotten me to approach and read classic literature from genres that I would have otherwise never have touched. In addition, choosing between a short book like Metamorphosis (9 issues) or a longer book like Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (208 issues) is now based on mood preference rather than feeling intimidated by the latter’s length… the issues are roughly the same for both. Most importantly, this system helps to quantify reading by what I consider a more reasonable metric: either issues or reading time (your choice).

Am I going to drop my “12 books a year” reading goal? Nah, not really. If anything, now I am not sweating if I succeed or not because I can look back and see that I read a lot of pages or a spent a lot of time doing it. At the time of this post, it’s very likely this goal is going to be blasted anyways… 8 books read already in 3 months compared to just 5 video games beaten. I am quite looking forward to my end-of-year results!