Reading Goals: 200 Pages a Week

Well, it's the New Year.  Everyone on booktube is talking about their reading goals.
I've noticed most of my fellow booktubers are setting goals for themselves in terms of the number of books they want to read in 2024.  But measuring reading by the number of books never made a lot of sense to me, because books vary widely in length.

For example, this past year I read Children's Stories From Old British and Irish Legends which was 190 pages, and also Journey to the West which was 2346 pages.  If I count them each as "1 book", then what am I even doing here?

[Perhaps this disparity is because of my reading habits.  Maybe I like to mix up epic classics and children's books more than most booktubers.  Maybe your average booktuber just reads a lot of novels that are all solidly 300-400 pages long.]

But anyway, I prefer to do it by page count.

Now, I know, even page counts are not accurate across books.  Because the number of words per page also varies widely per book.  Some books have very large font, some books have very small font.
But, at a certain point you just have to throw your hands up and accept the limitations of your chosen measurement.  I mean, word count would be the most accurate means of measuring my reading progress.  But I'm not going to count the words of everything I read, so page count it is.

Many years ago (back when I still lived in Cambodia), I decided my daily goal for reading was 20 pages a day.  This was about the amount of pages I could read in an 40-60 minutes.  It was also just about the amount of pages I could comfortably read before I started to get antsy and lose focus.  After about 20 pages, I felt like I needed to take a break from my book and do something else for a while.

So, a good reading week for me, then, is 140 pages (20 pages times 7 days).

But I've decided to round that number up to 200 to try to push myself just a little bit more.

200 is a stretch for me, to be honest, but then the whole point of making New Year's goals is to try to push yourself.

The other reason for choosing 200 is I was watching Steve Donoghue's interview with Jared Henderson, and at one point Jared said that since having the baby he was so busy now that he only had time for one book a week.  And I thought "I'm also crazy busy since having kids.  But if he can manage a book a week, then maybe I could push myself to 200 pages a week."  I mean, it's not quite a book, but 200 pages is close to a book.

So that's my goal.  We'll see how I do.  

In 2021, I averaged 164 pages a week.  In 2022, I averaged 99 pages a week.  In 2023, I did 168 pages per week.  Maybe I can get that closer to 200 in 2024?

Of course, the problem with New Year's goals is that they all have to be balanced against each other.  I've also committed myself to finishing Vietnamese on Duolingo in 2024.  And for this first week of 2024, I spent loads of time on Duolingo, but not so much time on my reading.  So I'm going to have to figure out if I can keep both my Duolingo goals and my reading goals in 2024.  But I'm going to try.

Update--I also explained this goal in my January 07, 2024 Weekly Reading Vlog