How I'm Scheduling My Readings

So I have these 52 books I want to get through this year, have I mentioned? I KNOW, I have indeed mentioned. My real problem is that I actually want to read MORE than 52 books. I have a huge to-read list, and I like to read non-fiction that isn't country-specific. Specifically, I want to make some headway into my sci-fi/ genre/ horror to-read stack, such as the Sookie Stackhouse novels, before attending DragonCon next year. Sci-fi and horror are actually my preferred fiction genre, and it was tough to get any that were set in other countries (I did manage to get a couple). I'm trying not to schedule these too far in advance, but it doesn't look like that's going to be possible.

Right now, it looks as though my January reading is largely taken up by the challenge.

• Week One: Elizabeth the Queen (United Kingdom) - 537 pages
• Week Two: Lone Survivor (Afghanistan) - 400 pages
• Week Three: Caribbee (Jamaica/Barbados) - 452 pages
• Week Four: The Windup Girl (Thailand) - 359 pages

I'm on track to finish Elizabeth the Queen by Saturday, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. The book has 21 chapters, each with approximately 25 pages, so I'm reading about 75 pages, or 3 chapters, per day. It's pretty time consuming, but I'm trying to get some reading done in the morning, some in the afternoon and some before I go to bed. The other books won't be as bad, requiring that I read only 57, 65 and 51 pages per day to finish in one week. So that's basically what I'm doing, is looking at the number of pages in the book and dividing them by 7, then reading that many per day. If it's on Kindle - which all but Elizabeth the Queen are for this month - then my aim is to read 15% per day.

This is because my goal is to read at least one book per week. That doesn't seem that ambitious until we're looking at a book like Russka, my choice for Russia, which is something insane, like 960 pages. That's about 137 pages per day, which is just not realistic. I could pair it up with something short like The Alchemist, my choice for Spain, which is a relatively slim 167 pages. The two books together make up 1127 pages.  Spread out over two weeks, that's about 80 pages a day, which is still a lot, but it's not nearly as daunting as 140 pages.

However, if I pair BOTH of those books up with Crocodile on the Sandbank, my choice for Egypt, for a third book, I get 1389 pages between the three books. Divided by 21 days (three weeks), that's just 66 pages per day, which is very doable. Then I'll pick a fourth book that I can get through in a week, probably Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (China), which is a mere 237 pages. I'll likely read that in less than a week, and then have a couple of days left over, so I may squeeze in a fifth book there, or I may spread out  read a second book in the evenings that isn't related to the challenge. I'm thinking I may go ahead and finish Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and/or the last Hunger Games novel, since the movie comes out in March, and I LOVED the first two. Shamelessly, I might add.

So even though I don't want to schedule things ahead of time and read whatever strikes my whim, I think I'm going to have to, just to be able to get through them all and not overwhelm myself. Oh, bother.