Sixty Books. One Year. Go.

“I love deadlines,” Douglas Adams had said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they pass by.” Adams was notorious for never meeting a deadline he did not like, or, indeed, never meeting any deadline.

And he was right to do that. Deadlines are frightening. Consider the most common deadline people put in front of themselves right around this time of year. Once January begins, people start all sorts of resolutions, which have a very definite deadline - the first day of January of the next year. It’s a very reliable deadline, because it comes by if you’ve managed to meet the goals you’ve set for yourself or not.

Those of us who are adept at making these resolution lists know, it is vitally important to have at least something on that list which has the potential of being completed come January first of that next year. One strategy is to put some resolutions on that list which will have a better chance of being completed. Those are usually small and insignificant. Another strategy is to put a resolution on that list which is so far-fetched it makes the other incomplete resolutions on the list seem reasonable, and those are naturally very large and insignificant.

I do my best to include at least one of these every year as a kind of an insurance policy. This year, it’s reading sixty books by the end of the year (this would be a product of the latter strategy). But this year I’ve decided to try out something different. “What if,” I told myself. “I would actually complete this goal?”

Other than the inherent gains of the knowledge and added world views that these sixty books will provide, there is not much I could benefit from with this goal - meaning, it does not fit into any of the other pigeonholes I’ve set for myself for improvement throughout the year. It’s not even a “read more” type of goal - I may very well already be reading sixty books a year, but I’ve never counted them or reported on them before.

That aspect is an interesting one - would accounting for the books I read affect the trajectory I have set for myself for this year? Will reading these books, or writing on them, take me on altogether different journeys? Will I find myself in a completely different place than where I’ve started the year, just because of this one goal?

Let’s find out, then. Chapter 1.