My week tracking my reading habits to find out: am I a slow or fast reader?
As a child, I was more interested in spending my time in ballet class than reading books. But one day, our next-door neighbor, Paul, knocked on the door and asked my parents if they were interested in wanting a big box of books for me and my siblings that his children no longer wanted. My parents accepted the box of books and showed it to me and my siblings. The first book I saw in the box was Harry and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling; it was one of the biggest books I probably ever saw. The cover looked so fun and interesting that I just had to see what it was about. I found myself entering this amazing wizarding world that sparked so much imagination in my head about being in this magical school of wizards and mystical creatures. Ever since then, I have had so much passion for big fantasy books and exploring other fantasy worlds that I can imagine myself in.
Though because of how much I loved reading big books, I ended up filling up my entire book shelf with not a single empty space to fill. This issue led me to buy a Kindle, which allowed me to have as many books as I wanted. When I was ready to start my newest book, A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, I got a notification on my kindle saying there was a new program to track the percentage of books I read, how many minutes I read each day, and how many pages I read each day. I decided to try it because I personally have always felt like I take so long to read a book, or I’m always shocked when I look at the time and realize I haven’t even read that much of my book yet.
Once I started the program, I tracked myself every day until I finished A Court of Mist and Fury. The scatterplot below shows the number of minutes it took me to read the same number of pages each day. This data was collected through a timer in the program that started and stopped while I read each day, while also marking the pages I started and stopped at.
The bar chart below shows the data I collected for the percentage of the book I stopped at each day until I got to 100% of completing the book. While reading the book, it felt really rewarding to see how much the percentage would increase each time and get to that goal of fully finishing it. I feel like this program could actually motivate me to read a little more each day because each time I read, I would want to get higher in percentage each time or as close as possible to a certain percentage I wanted to get that day.
From the data I collected, I found some really interesting facts about myself as a reader. I always seem to start off really strong on the first two days, the fourth day, and the last day. I seem to read a lot more during those days than the other days, because that’s where the book starts off, where the book has its climax, and where the book has the ending I have been waiting for. During days three, five, and six, I do see that the book probably has not had the most interesting story line happening yet, so I can see where my hesitation with wanting to read more that day might have happened.
In conclusion, I found that it does take me a little longer than average to read. It took me a total reading time of 13 hours and 6 minutes, and according to Reading Length, this book takes the average reader 10 hours and 26 minutes to read. (source: https://www.readinglength.com/book/isbn-140885788X). It also took me a week to read 598 pages, for an average of reading over 100 pages for over 2 hours each day. I would like to practice increasing my reading speed to get through books faster and just keep increasing the number of books I read each month or year. I will continue using this program in the future because I do feel like it can motivate me to not just read my book normally but to reach the goal of finishing it.
