Today was just one of those days when my professor gets into speech mode. Today's speech was about how my professor went to this leadership conference and saw the likes of Steven Spielberg there as well. The challenge presented at this conference was to read a book a day for a year. People in the media field must do a lot of reading, you see, so this was not an outlandish thing to suggest. But a book a day? 365 books in a year? I tried to think of how many books in a year I've read, and I doubt the number could breach a hundred.
This also got me thinking to how lax my reading has been lately. Since I'd first learned to read I've been a big reader. Book after book as clueless friends say, "But didn't you have a different book yesterday?" I was proud of my reading. I plowed through the small chapter books when I was younger. Later I started on young teen books and eventually moved onto adult novels. Heck in 3rd grade I was reading 1000 Leagues Under the Sea (though I admit, I never finished it). The point is, I read all the time. I would finish one of those small chapter books in a day easily. Thicker books maybe 2-3 days. When a book took a week to read, it would feel like I've been reading it forever.
Perhaps a combination of an increased workload and other stresses slowed my reading down in my junior/senior years of high school. I remember reading the second book in the Inheritance trilogy, Eldest, wondering why I was being so slow with it. Believe it or not, I was sad that I wasn't reading as much as I used to.
I still read, though I don't devote the time I used to for it. Now, thinking of this challenge, I want to get back into reading an insane amount of books. There are so many books I have that I haven't read yet, and so many books I want to read. So that's it. I'm taking the challenge.
Now, moving from half a week to read a book to a day may be an extreme move, so I'm molding the challenge a little. I have a reason for fudging the rules. I will begin by timing myself on my reading time in days. Book after book, I will decrease this reading time until I can begin meeting the challenge's demands. Maybe then I will start the 365 day counter and truly begin the challenge.
What do you think? Will you attempt the challenge with me? There are plenty of benefits to reading books, so just imagine reading a whole lot more and what you can learn, how you can improve yourself as a person, and what you can hope to achieve.
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