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I challenged myself to read every day, and it changed my life 📚

Lucy Linder on January 31, 2023

In May 2020, I made a commitment to read for at least 10 minutes every day, and this challenge has had a big impact on my life. I have gained self-...
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fredzer profile image
Frédéric Lugbull • Edited

Thanks for sharing this. It's funny, I myself did the same commitment (30 minutes a day of reading for me) 4 months ago. I've already read 12 books, including some classics I'd always wanted to read (Anne Franck, Lord of the flies, etc.). That's the real beauty of this habit: you read things that you always had planned for later because now that you read a lot, every 3 to 10 days, you have to pick a new book and it's easy to pick an old classic because you know that even if it doesn't tempt you too much, you'll only read it in a few days before moving on to a book that was more tempting.

For my part, I've put everything on a Google Sheet (including when I started and finished the book, my review, etc.). I included a column for if the book appears in at least two lists of Great books to have read in your life (or the 100 greatest books, whatever), and I've skimmed many of these kind of lists. I also give a note out of 10 so that I can recommend books quickly. And I've put a dropdown list to indicate if it's a Fantasy book, a Self help book, a Biography, etc.

I have yet to plug my Google Sheet to an API like Goodread to be able to retrieve more info easily, like books cover or publication date.

Last but not least: it's such a pleasure to pick the next book, it's amazing. And you feel great by having an habit that make you happy/smarter/more confident.

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Lucy Linder

Wow, awesome! The google sheet is indeed an easy and effective way to track everything :)

As much as I agree that picking the next book is a great feeling, I must admit it also became a burden in the past months. Finding original books is hard when you read a lot, and it takes some time! I usually try to keep a backlog in case I finish a book faster than expected and don't have the time to research another one.

I am reading on an e-reader (I use Calibre to manage the library btw). This is maybe why it is so hard: when switching to digital, you basically have everything at hand, which is quite overwelming compared to going to your favorite bookshop. And you, do you read paperbacks? Any good book to recommend?

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fredzer profile image
Frédéric Lugbull • Edited

Hello Lucy!
I read paperbacks for now because I have acquired lots of them, and my wife told me that as long as I had not read all of the books at home, I wouldn't get a Kindle ;)
That's perhaps why it is indeed easier and fun to pick each next book to read: my personal library is filled with book I've been dying to read for a long time, and I have scores of them. When I'll switch to Kindle, my google sheet list with books that I've been advised to read or coming from the Top books lists that I've reviewed, will help a lot.

To find great new books, the other advice I would give is to ask some friends, colleagues or library sellers what are the 3 books they love the most, or the ones that changed their life or were just mind blowing or too fun to put down.

Books I would recommend to anyone (read sometimes many times):
Musk biography (by Vance, I think)
The name of the wind (Rothfuss)
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)
Rhapsody (Elizabeth Haydon)
Harry Potter (1 to 4, disliked the 3 last ones)
Sapiens (Harari)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
The Ice People (René Barjavel). La nuit des temps in french (I'm French by the way)
Atlas shrugged (Ayn Rand)
The road to serfdom (Hayek)
Not without my daughter (Betty Mahmoody and William Hoffer)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
Wizard's first rule (Terry Goodkind)
1984 (Orwell)

Don't hesitate to share your favorites too!

Happy reading!
Frédéric

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10x learner

Such an interesting and inspiring experience !

I didn't know reading "trackers" where a thing. Since I also want to read more, I will definitely try them 😄

I am curious, do you use the Boosted app that you mentionned for other activities ? Would you recommand it ?

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Lucy Linder • Edited

So happy to hear it!

I only use Boosted to track hobbies. I have the premium version so I can export everything as CSV for my stats. For work, I use work log instead, which I find more suitable. And yes, I recommend it!

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tafri profile image
Shobhit Asati

Try serial reader!

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

I didn't know about serialreader.org/ (Android + iOS app), that is an interesting product! I personally love the freedom of reading as much (or as little) as I want, but this may be beneficial to others, thanks for sharing!

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bratGitHub

Wonderful... By creating new habits we can create useful data to help us in the evaluation of how these habits are running... But at the heart is the commitment itself ... Thnx for sharing your experience..

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Shobhit Asati

I am more interested in the GitHub repo, can you make it more general [ or if you need help with that, I can help! ], so that people can fork it and use it for themselves.

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Lucy Linder

That's an interesting idea!

Right now, the CSV format for the data is already quite generic - except for the meta.json which is tight to MyBooks. It is only used to link book titles to GoodReads, so we could do without.
For the code though, to be honest it was more like a toy project to try react, and I am quite displeased with the performance (especially the loading time). To work with CSV/DataFrames, I used Danfo.js, but it is quite a poor alternative to Python Pandas (that I used in my first version of the site, still available at derlin.github.io/reading-challenge/). I would thus definitely need some help to improve on this side.

If people are interested in collaborating on this, I would be thrilled to prepare a base on GitHub and start the discussions! Let me know :)

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tafri profile image
Shobhit Asati • Edited

Cool, I am interested! Give me till Monday I'll go through the repo.
I think I missed the point, just to confirm, is there a code repo for this?
From the top of my head, we can make it RESTful, I can work on the backend.

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

Forgot it was still private. I will notify you as soon as I find 5 minutes to change this 😊
I would personally like to keep it static, so we can use netlify or github pages to deploy it for free. What do you think?

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Shobhit Asati

With some googling Netlify looks better choice, so I think we should use netlify, now the only thing left is to learn it!!😅
But I am up for a challenge!👊🏾

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Lucy Linder

I haven't had time to clean it up or even add a Readme (I am currently abroad for work), but it is now public at least. We can continue the discussion on github 😊 github.com/derlin/reading-stats

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tafri profile image
Shobhit Asati

Awesome!!

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Marflage

Good read! I agree with you.

  • I second the idea of taking some time off habits and giving yourself a bit of time so as not to burn out.
  • Progress monitoring is also really important. It gives a sense of accomplishment and confidence in one's self, giving a bird's eye view.
  • I prefer not the idea of tracking my time spent in any habit. It gives me anxiety and I am constantly thinking of how little time I have and end up somewhat wasting my time and not being able to focus completely.
  • To complement my previous point, it happens so often with me that I can not control myself to read much more than I initially intended to. As a solution, I track the amount of pages read and am flexible with the limit if there are a few pages to finish off the chapter.
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Alicja

Thank you Lucy for sharing that. I have to say I have a similar experience, meaning, used to read a lot and then got burried in work....long story and I aback on track with reading now. Yes, you right, you need to find some hobby outside the tech bubble (well works for me) to keep your brain going. Sewing is my meditation:-) and what helps me a lot with stress of everyday.

Keep up with reading.

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Victor Dorneanu

I use "Loop Habit Tracker" (Androi) to track: Reading, Cold Shower, Meditation, Breath work, Drumming, Sports. You can easily export to CSV and it has own reporting features. I usually have one widget per habit on my home screen so I can easily tap it whenever I have accomplished one habit.

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As for the reading I usually try to read 3-5 books per month. I then have a look at the total page number of each book and assign myself a daily rate of reading (e. g. 50 pages per day). I'm not very strict at it but it helps me to actually read more.

I use Emacs, ORG mode and org-roam to manage quotes and highlights from books (as part of my knowledge management system).

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

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Masashi

Wow, this was motivating and relatable. Also, thanks for sharing about the reading-tracker things.

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George Linardis

Wow thank you very much for sharing! You inspired me on using the same tools and also build a similar app to track my progress too. I was always wondering how much time I end up spending on side-projects, reading goals etc and your logic will help me understand that for sure and improve! :)

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Lucy Linder • Edited

So happy to hear! Keep us updated on your progresses, I would be very interested in seeing what you come up with 😊

Or maybe you could join @tafri and I, and we could try doing an awesome generic app together?

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zankyr • Edited

Out of curiosity, what are the features of the MyBook app, since you are using both GoodReads and MyBook?

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Lucy Linder • Edited

Well, the best feature is that it is my doing, and it has an octopus logo :)

But more seriously, I tailor-made MyBooks to fit only one use-case: tracking my books read. Compared to GoodReads:

  • a clean and compact view of all the books, along with author and date read - GoodReads view is paginated and doesn't go straight to the point
  • ability to sort by read date, date of publication, or alphabetically (both ascending/descending)
  • personal notes attached to each book, which are not public in any way - I like the privacy
  • very fast search, in all fields (personal notes included) - GoodReads search is quite slow, and I am not sure you can only search in one of your lists
  • book and metadata saved: each book has title, author, date read, GoodReads ID (and link to GoodReads page), number of pages, publication date.
  • everything (notes and metadata) are stored in a simple JSON that you can either export or sync in DropBox. This makes it easy to build other apps and tools on top of it, and DropBox ensures backups are taken care of :)
  • If the internet goes down or GoodReads disappears, I still have my JSON file! I can even edit it manually if I wish to.
  • other nice features, such as a direct link to Google search to get other information

Bonus: the metadata are fetched automatically from GoodReads, you do not need to add them manually. Just search the title, clic on the right book in the result list, and fields get populated for you. I use goodreads-metadata-fetcher for that - a library in Kotlin I created and maintain myself → docs source

I put it on the play store once, but never updated it. If other people are interested, the source code is on GitHub and I can definitely improve a bit the repo to add a readme and an automated apk build, let me know!

preview

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zankyr

It looks very interesting, I’ll definitely take a look.

Thanks for sharing.

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malzeri83

OMG! You are really concentrated in reading)))
Anyway, the same thoughts, thank you for sharing, quite interesting text)