Do you Know How Much you Read?

Okay guys, I’m posting this way later in the day than I’ve posted in a long time. Why? Because last night I fell asleep something like three hours earlier than normal. So I didn’t write anything for today just two days after I promised to write a post every day this month. I wanted my streak to last longer than two whole days, so now you’re getting a slightly delayed post.

So, do you know how much you read? It seems like an easy enough question, right? You’re probably thinking that you can look on your shelf and know which books you’ve read. Or perhaps you have a nice little spreadsheet with the information. That’s all fine and dandy, but I’m talking more than that.

Can you tell me how many hours you read in 2013? Or 2012? Or maybe the last five years? I started timing my reading at the beginning of 2012, which also happens to be my best reading year yet. I read 44 books that year, 38 of which I have information for. I can tell you that those 38 books took me 10 days, 5 hours, 54 minutes, and 51 seconds to read. So the other six books I didn’t track likely added another day and a half of reading. I can also tell you that I took the most amount of time to read Gears of War: Coalition’s End at a ridiculous 13:07:57. That is a LONG time to be reading one book. In my defense, it is still the longest book I’ve read at a cool 591 pages. I can also tell you that I took the least amount of time to read A Savage Place by Robert B. Parker, taking only 3:26:12 to read its 184 pages.

Isn’t it awesome? To have all this information at your finger tips about YOUR reading. It’s nice to see the books on your shelf or on your Kindle, knowing you’ve read them. But I think it’s pretty cool to be able to look at which books took you a long time to read and which ones you maybe weren’t interested in.

PS: I didn’t read a single page during the months of July, September, October, or November that year.

So tell me, do you REALLY know how much you read?

Here’s my spreadsheet for the year.

 

Tracking Your Reading

Photo Credit: A Day Dreamer’s World

I know most people on here at least keep a list of books they’ve read. But I think I might take tracking my reading a step further. Or ten.

I began tracking my reading back in 2010 by simply listing out the books I read in a Word document along with the date I finished the book. Nothing too sophisticated. But eventually that grew into something more at the start of 2012. I started using Excel spreadsheets to better keep track my reading during each season. Not only would the book and date be recorded, but also the amount of time it took for me to read the book, the book’s page count, and the book’s series. It is because of this information that I know I read more than ten full days in 2012. I know there are people reading a whole lot more than that, but that’s a fairly significant amount of time if you ask me.

Now I generally have a Word document and an Excel spreadsheet for each season of every year. At the end of the year I combine all of the books into a single spreadsheet and take a look at when I had long periods of no reading and how many books by particular authors I read and more. I also of course have my What I’m Reading page on here that also lists the books I’ve finished.

I know Goodreads is an easy way to track your reading, but I don’t use it much. But what about you, how do you go about keeping track of your reading?