A year of Reading

A while ago, I outlined a system that I implemented to ensure that I a) read more books and b) read a variety of books. In short, I have books grouped in 5 lists: Recreational, Classical Reading, Technical Reading, Business Reading, and Religious reading. At any given time, I have 3 books I'm reading: a Recreational or Classical reading book, a Technical or Business book, and a Religious book. I read the first category of books on Monday's, Friday's, and Saturday's, while I read the second list on Tuesday through Thursday. The Religious books are left for Sunday.

And this system has worked very well for 2011, the first full year I've tried it. In that span of time, I've read 10 Recreational books, 5 Classical books, 3 Technical books and 5 Business books for a total of 23 books. The books, in chronological order of my reading them are:

• Gulliver's Travels (Classical)
• jQuery in Action (Technical)
• Warrior Heir (Recreational)
• Pride and Prejudice (Classical)
• Web Marketing for Dummies (Business)
• Wizard Heir (Recreational)
• Arguing with Idiots (Recreational)
• Oliver Twist (Classical)
• More Eric Meyer on CSS (Business)
• 4 Hour Work Week (Business)
• Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft (Recreational)
• Latitude (Recreational)
• Time Machine (Recreational)
• Fahrenheit 451 (Recreational)
• Frankenstein (Recreational)
• Jane Eyre (Classical)
• Silverlight 4 in Easy Steps (Technical)
• ADO.NET 2.0 Core Reference (Technical)
• Dragon Heir (Recreational)
• Strength Finder 2.0 (Business)
• The Scarlet Letter (Classical)
• Hackers and Painters (Business)
• Atlas Shrugged (Recreational)

There was a span in the middle of the year where I read a lot of Recreational books. This was during June and July, when I read 8 books for our library reading program. At our library during the summer, library patrons can receive a free book for every 4 books they read from the library. My wife ended up reading 4 books a week during this time period (for a total of 36 books!). Sadly, in that 2 month time span, she read more books then I did in the entire year.

I doubt I will be able to surpass her next year, but my goal is simply to read at least 25 books next year. And with that goal set, I better get to work.

Final Update on book

First see about my efforts to write a novel here and here.

The month of November seemed to pass by in a blur. A lot happened in the month, but the one thing that did not happen was me finishing my book. Sadly, I only finished a 1/5th of the book. I'm sadly disappointed, but I've learned a few things.

• An idea is not enough. You need to prepare for more than a few minutes to plan things out all the way through.
• Reading is a lot like programming, in the respect that in both crafts, you must keep many things in your head simultaneously to ensure that all angles are accounted for.
• Along the same lines, distractions can kill your train of thought. My wife spent many evenings upstairs with me watching TV while I wrote. Unfortunately, I can't just turn out the TV and during an hour with the TV on, I often found myself writing just a few words or sentences. Far short of where I needed to be.
• The stories in my head and my style of writing fit better as short stories.

While I don't know if I'll ever have a professional career as a writer, I think some of these lessons can be applied to other efforts elsewhere. For instance, I've instituted (much to my wife's chagrin) a no TV rule upstairs for 1 hour after my son goes to bed. This quiet time I will utilize for other projects I plan to work on in the next year.

I can also learn from my mistakes with the preparation of the story. Going into the month, I felt like if I spent time planning out the plot of the story, I would be cheating. But, I needed direction and a plan for where the story was to go. I eventually did write an outline for the story, but this took more precious time away from me, time that I could have used.

I will continue to work on my story. My goal is to have it finished sometime next year before next November. Then, if I attempt another novel next November, I can learn from my mistakes.

And perhaps next time, I'll pursue a group of short stories instead.

Book Update

It is now over halfway through National Novel Writing month. At this point, I should have 25,000 words written out of 50,000 by now. Unfortunately, I've only written 7,915 words for my goal, way short of where I'd hoped to be by now.

How did this happen? For me, writing is a much lengthier process then I expected. While it may seem easy to keep all of the details about your characters to paper in your head, in reality, it's very hard to be able to recall all of the minor details that make up the story. I'm sure most authors have a system in place to assist in this, but I certainly could use such a system to manage everything in my head.

In addition to being busy and unorganized, I've also found that I have difficulties focusing long enough to decide what to write and type the words on the screen. By the time I recall the necessary points of the story, I often have a distraction which prevents me from writing. Part of this is due to my desk setup at home, and partially because I'm easily distracted.

Finally, I wanted to reflect on my tool of choice so far in this project, Google Docs. The standard web version of the application works pretty well, especially in Chrome. Occasionally in Firefox I've been unable to enter text. Refreshing the page usually resolved this issue, but I've just made the switch to Chrome to edit the book chapters.

But, the Android app is a little awkward to use. It highlights the entire row you're editing, even when that row is word wrapped. For some reason, this reminds me of vim, which is not something I want out of a tool to write a book. For programming, this might work, but as a general purpose text editor, it doesn't work.

Additionally, the up and down arrows scroll the text in the window instead of moving the cursor up and down rows. This is much tougher to work around than the purely aesthetic issue with the row highlight. On a slower Android phone like the one I use, it can take a while to load ta document to edit it. Yet, when you select a document, it opens it up for viewing. If you want to actually edit your document, you have to press an 'Edit ' button to load another screen which contains the edit elements on it. Performance wise, it took about 20 seconds to load the application, about a minute to load one of my chapters in the application, then about another 15 seconds to load the document again to edit it. A slow phone and a slow network exacerbate the performance issues with the application and the architecture around it. In the end, I've typed only a small portion of the book on my phone and done the rest of the writing on a desktop through the browser to Google Docs. Its still a good way to write a novel, even if its not as easy to write on-the-go as I was hoping.