I Tried to Read 30 Books in 30 Days

With work slowing down, I will at last have time for bigger and more challenging goals to do for the channel, starting with one that I've been wanting to do for a long, long time now, and that is to read 30 books in 30 days. So the first one I'm going to start with is Little Children by Tom Pareto. It is a book I've been wanting to read for such a long time, and I'm finally going to crack it open today. So day one, book one, here we go. Before I get going, I should probably lay out how the rules for this challenge are going to work. When I add up my page count at the end of the month, I'll need to average at least 250 pages per book. So reading a short novella is fine, so long as it's balanced out with a longer book. But I'm limiting this challenge exclusively to books I've never read before, so both of these wouldn't count. As for something like comic books, yes, they count, but their pages will only be worth half a page of a standard book. So by the end of day one, I've managed to make it all the way to page 109, which is just over a third of the way through the book, which means I'm going to really, really need to pick up my pace, otherwise this challenge is going to be a colossal failure. When I go for a run, I'm listening to an audiobook at one and a quarter speed, as I find reading fast keeps me more engaged and helps with Today, it's Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. So it is day nine and I have just finished reading Tom Pareto's Little Children. While I was working on this book, I did manage to read two others. One of them was Ray Bradbury's children's book Halloween Tree, which is wonderfully imaginative and I thoroughly enjoyed the last half of, and I listened to the audiobook called Everybody Lies, which is about big internet data and what it can tell us about humans and what we are putting into the internet. I need to pick up the pace a little bit, so I'm going to read another young audience and children's book, hopefully finish it today, and that is A Monster Calls. So I'm working on this and oh my gosh, so much more reading to do. On day 11, I want to try something different, so I visit the Lillian H. Smith Library to check out their Merrill Collection of Science Fiction. The Merrill Collection of Science Fiction boasts one of the largest research libraries for sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction in the world, with over 72,000 books. So this seems like a great spot to try out two new authors, the first one being Ursula K. Le Guin, who I've never read before. I'm going to read her The Left Hand of Darkness, and for fantasy, Clive Barker's Weave World. Really looking forward to jumping in and trying a full novel from him. Two books, hopefully I'll get one finished and a lot of progress in the next in today. So it is 1 30 in the morning right now, and I haven't touched a book in two whole days. Catherine and I are going on vacation tomorrow, and I've got to have this assembly edit done for another video, and it's just wiped out and wasted two whole days that could have been invested in the reading challenge, and I'm still not done. We hit the road tomorrow, so I am feeling like there is a good chance I've bitten off a lot more than I can chew with this challenge. So Catherine and I are currently en route to hopefully a restful and relaxing week at a cottage in New Brunswick. She is taking over at the wheel right now, which means it is my turn to read Children of Blood and Bone. We've been alternating between driving and reading, driving and reading, so hopefully for the remainder of this long drive, we will bang out a whole bunch of pages, and I'll at least have close to another book read by the time I get there. After 10 hours on the road, we have made it to our cabin in the Belle Isle. We managed to read through 230 pages of this book. Honestly, I was hoping to be a little further along through it after 10 whole hours, but it's okay. And these, these are all the other books I have brought with me for the week. Honestly, I feel like I'm in a bit of a do-or-die scenario where if I don't make a lot of progress on this trip, this challenge is over. I will have no chance of catching up. The one thing that is giving me hope is I am over halfway through three of these books, and they're all meaty books. It's between 700 and 400 pages. Once I am through those three, hopefully, hopefully I can burn through a lot of these shorter books and start catching up towards my 30-book goal. This morning, I am reading Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. It feels like the perfect book to be reading right now on just a dreary, overcast day like today, and honestly, having this time in the morning to just come up by the water and read has been so peaceful and so calming. And as much as I'm behind on this challenge, and that is still stressing me out a little bit, the actual act of reading has been so restful and so peaceful, and I am ready to do some more. During our nine-day trip, I managed to read through 11 books, which is finally the pace I wanted to be reading at. Of the books I didn't mention already in the video, some of the ones I read included Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevens, The Man Who Would Be King and other stories by Rudard Kipling, The Wind in the Willows, Good Story That Won by Thomas King, The Math Myth and other STEM delusions, also Creating Character Arcs, a book on writing, and also the audio book for the short novella, The Willows. Now that I'm back, I still have 12 books to read, and I am down to just six days left, so sink or swim. For the home stretch, my goal is to read constantly. When I make breakfast, I'm listening to an audio book. When I'm at the laundromat, I take a book with me, or when I'm on transit, even when I'm just relaxing at the park. Whatever it takes to complete this goal. To make matters harder, on my final day, I'm flying out to Vancouver first thing in the morning, which means I'll only have until 12pm to finish a remaining 468 pages. In the end, I fell 75 pages short of finishing S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. 75 pages. So, I managed to read 29 and three quarter books in 30 days. Right now I'm in Vancouver visiting and I have so many great books I want to talk about. Some of my favorites from this challenge include The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison, Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Left-Handed Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the book Marlena by Julie Bunton. It is so beautifully written, I honestly can't believe it's the author's first book, but my favorite book from this entire challenge was Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Honestly, this book completely changed the way I prioritize sleep for myself, and completely changed my perspective on how much our society should value sleep. I posted a complete list of the 29 books I read below, and I'm going to do a 3-minute thoughts video on whichever book gets the most requests and upvotes in the comments, so it's up to you. Thank you again for watching, and go read something interesting.