page count goals

[Andrew]

What are people's thoughts on page count goals? For the last 3 years I've been challenging myself to exceed the previous year in both number of books and page count. Both goals are subjective - for example, I could read a thousand pages of Dr. Seuss or a thousand pages of ancient history; or I could read a twenty page Dr. Seuss book or a thousand page history book. Neither metric is a meaningful comparison.

Goodreads encourages book number goals but not page count goals. That's because we buy books, not pages.

At the end of the day neither goal really matters as long as we enjoy what we are doing.

What do you think?

[Tiffany, Administrator]

I always like seeing other people's goals -- whether book count, page count, or "Books written in the year I was born," etc. -- so it's interesting to me to watch others as they tally up the number of pages read.

However, like you said, there are ways around those tallies: If I want to read 50 books in one year, and I start off by reading Ulysses, that's going to put me behind schedule! So if I want to reach my goal of 50 books, I might start reaching for my stack of Nancy Drew books. Ditto with pages -- 783 pages of Ulysses is not the intellectual equivalent / brainpower necessary for 4 Nancy Drew books, with their easy language, illustrations, and wide margins.

Still, I like the page-count goal because it's different from my usual book-count goal. It's fun to shake things up :)

But I try remind people when they get bummed or stressed that they're behind on their goal for the year exactly what you said: At the end of the day neither goal really matters as long as we enjoy what we are doing."

[Andrew]

I'm thinking about adding one or two unique goals for the rest of the year. Sometimes forcing myself to try new things ends up horribly, but other times it opens up new avenues.

[Tiffany, Administrator]

And sometimes the rest of us just like to watch and see what others' unique goals end up being :)