Pages

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Friday, January 22, 2010

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Under The Dome (slow reading challenge)
































One of my many and awesome Christmas gifts last month was Stephen King's latest door stopper Under The Dome. Weighing in at 1,072 pages it's his third longest book after The Stand and It.

Andy, handsome as you are, I don't see how you can make time for this book and meet the grueling goals you've set for yourself in 2010.

Well, there's a few ways I can tackle this. The Old Andy (1979 - 2009) would've stuck his nose in the book to the exclusion of all else including wife, friends, and domestic chores, and would only come up for air once the book was completed. Given the length of this book, maybe five or seven days.

But this is the New Andy (2010 -), who is all about setting goals and writing in the third person, so therefore I give an additional new goal for this year:

4) Read Only One Book, And Take As Close To One Year As Possible To Do It.


I got this idea from the Final Fantasy VII speed runs I did last year, where I tried to beat said game as fast as possible. Of course this is the opposite type of challenge. Now I said the book was 1,072 pages long, but it starts on page three so it is actually 1,070 pages. For the book to last one year I would have to read 2.9315068493150684931506849315068 pages per day, but we'll call it three. So if I start tomorrow, January 3rd, I will finish in 356.66666666666666666666666666667 days,or just before Christmas 2010.

There are a couple advantages of this goal/challenge that spring immediately to mind. When I resume a more normal reading schedule next year (minus the ignoring the rest of the world) I'll have a whole years backlog to work through. This should help me get through the dry spells that pop up every year as I wait for my favorite authors to publish. Plus I won't be spending my money and wasting my time on the crap books I always turned to during those dry spells.

Can I meet the challenge of such moderation? Only time will tell.