A cooking blog I follow called Casual Kitchen had a great post the other day about what the author called his ‘voracious reading’ month: for 30 days, he committed to reading 150 pages per day as part of a effort to increase his attention span. As author Daniel explains:

“Everyone knows candy is okay in moderation, but terrible for you when eaten to excess. Well, what’s true about food is true about our information diets too. If most of your diet consists of bite-sized mental candy, your brain–and attention span–will slowly but surely rot.”

Daniel picked 150 pages per day as his target because it seemed a good number to quantify ‘a lot’ and because it would allow him to complete a decent quantity of books in the allotted time (about 15 or 20) so that he could explore big ideas and make connections between them. Indeed, int he capsule summaries of his completed books which follow, he marks several as ‘best of class’ and compares other to them to explain why these lesser books fell short.

The ‘voracious reading’ idea is an intriguing one for me. I do read ‘a lot’ but much of it is wasted on Facebook, blogs, news and other, as Daniel says, ‘bite-size’ things. Meanwhile, my to-read stack is getting uncomfortably high and I am starting to get that itchy ‘delete’ finger I get when I look at my Calibre library and it starts to feel like I could read until the day I die and never get through even half of it.

So maybe some ‘voracious’ reading is the answer. Maybe I need to commit to 30 days of full-on ‘voracious’ consumption to get the to-read list back to a manageable level. I don’t think I can track pages the way Daniel did since I do all my reading on my tablet devices these days. But I can set a book goal instead. I think I’ll aim for 25 books as a nice round number.

Anyone want to join me? I’ll report back in 30 days and let you know how I did.

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"I’m a journalist, a teacher and an e-book fiend. I work as a French teacher at a K-3 private school. I use drama, music, puppets, props and all manner of tech in my job, and I love it. I enjoy moving between all the classes and having a relationship with each child in the school. Kids are hilarious, and I enjoy watching them grow and learn. My current device of choice for reading is my Amazon Kindle Touch, but I have owned or used devices by Sony, Kobo, Aluratek and others. I also read on my tablet devices using the Kindle app, and I enjoy synching between them, so that I’m always up to date no matter where I am or what I have with me."

2 COMMENTS

  1. I find it hard to think about “150 pages” as a measurement. Number of words perhaps (from writing goals I suppose) or number of long form items.

    I aim at 50 long form readings a year, almost never quite get there.

    For me Long Form is Novellas, Kindle Singles, a standard Novel sort of reading.

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