It’s time to restart the reading log. This time for 2018. :-)
I’m not worried that I haven’t been reading enough fiction this year. Far from it. I spent a lot of time in the first half of this year reading fan fiction. A lot of fan fiction. I can’t tell you how much, but I was so focused on reading that I was reading 2-4 stories a day, a great many of which were novel length.
I delete fan fiction stories and books from my library as soon as I’ve read them if they’re not keepers.
Since January 1, I’ve added 277 stories to my library that I’ve read and gone on to keep because I might want to read them again some day. If that’s anywhere near a representative sample and I keep even one out of every three stories that I read… well, that’s a lot of reading. If I only kept one of out five (more likely) or eight (definitely possible), well then, the numbers start to get ridiculous. Considering how obsessively I was reading, it’s entirely possible the numbers are ridiculous.
All that said, there are a lot of original books I want to read, books I’ve been collecting all year, and it’s time I got started reading them. Putting a number to my progress will remind me not to let time get away from me now that I’m obsessing over my writing again.
I had originally posted all this to the top of the reading log page, but after a little thinking, I decided that I wanted to keep the reading log page focused on the actual reading log and not explanatory text. :)
Update on 1/12/19: During my year end clean up of a paper calendar I was keeping notes on, I found several lists of stories I read then deleted, along with notes about why. I added the ones I found to my personal reading log, but since you don’t care how many stories I actually read I’ll just say I definitely read more than the 277 stories mentioned above. :D