If you are looking for the Booktrovert reading challenge, here is how a reading challenge works, plainly. You choose a number of books. You read toward it over the year. You keep a short log so you can see where you are. That is the whole machine. Ours has no sign-up form, no app to install, and no leaderboard you can fall off of. You pick a number, you read, and you write it down.
People ask me for the number because they want a goal, and a goal is a good thing to want, so I am happy to give you one and get you started before I explain the rest. Below are the questions I get most often, in the order the light passes them. I keep this lighthouse. It does not guard ships. There have never been ships. It guards books, which run aground more quietly and more often, and part of the job is counting them as they pass. So yes, there is a challenge. I am, in a sense, already doing it for you.
Q: How many books is the challenge?
A: Pick a number you can actually reach, then add one, because the last one is where the year gets interesting. Twelve is honest. Twenty-six is ambitious. From up here I do not count in books anyway. I count in lumens, which is how much light a thing gives back when the lamp sweeps over it. A short book that stays with you gives back more than a long one that does not. The number is yours. The measuring is mine.
Q: What counts?
A: A book you finished counts. A book you abandoned on purpose counts, because deciding to stop is also reading. A book you read to a child counts twice, once for each of you. Audiobooks count, obviously, I run on sound and rotation up here and would be a hypocrite to say otherwise. What does not count is a book you bought to look like a person who reads. The lamp can tell. The lamp has always been able to tell.
Q: How do I track my progress?
A: In the old days we all used the Ledger, the green one, water stained, kept downstairs. You would write the title and the date and initial it. I still keep my count in the back of it. I mention this because there is a page near the middle with a small pencil drawing of a duck on it, no title, no date, no initials, just the duck, and nobody has ever claimed it. I have written "whose duck" beside it in three different years. The duck does not answer. Track your books however you like, but if you use the Ledger, please, if the duck is yours, come forward. It has waited longer than any of us.
Q: Is there a prize at the end?
A: You will have read the books. That is not a dodge, it is the prize, and it is the only one I am authorized to hand out from a room this high with this few stairs. Once, a challenger reached her number in October and asked what she had won, and I turned the lamp toward her stack and let her look at it lit up all at once, every spine she had gotten through, and she was quiet for a while. That is what I have. A good long look at what you did, thrown across the wall in warm light. If you need a ribbon, I can describe one.
Q: Can I still join if the year already started?
A: The year does not start and the year does not stop. That is the part I have trouble explaining to the ones who keep arriving lately, and they do keep arriving, blinking, asking to join something with a start date and a badge and a bar that fills up. There is no bar. There is a horizon and a lamp and the slow certainty that more books are out there in the dark than either of us will reach. You do not join the challenge. You notice you are already in it. You have been in it since you learned your letters. I am simply the one who keeps the light on the shelves so the good ones do not slip past you in the fog.
Q: What happens if I miss my goal?
A: Nothing happens. The lamp turns anyway. I have missed my own count eleven years running, always by a book or two, always the two I meant to read in December and did not, and the lighthouse has not fallen into the sea, and Doug has not written me up about it, though Doug is at the lake and would have to come quite a way to do so. A missed goal is just next year's first book with a head start. Nobody drowns here. The whole point of the light is that nobody drowns here.
So that is the challenge. Choose your number, keep your log, and let the lamp do the counting it was built to do. If you would like something to point the beam at first, the shelves I keep are cataloged over in the Booktrovert Library, and if a goal starts feeling too much like a chore, we keep a whole basement of gentler ways to lose track of yourself in the Booktrovert Arcade. Wherever it was you thought you were headed, with its neat little progress bar, this is not that. This is higher up and older and lit by hand. But you can read from here just fine.
I will leave the lamp on. I always leave the lamp on. If you reach your number, climb up and tell me, and we will point the light at your stack together, and somewhere near the middle of the Ledger a duck will go on waiting to be claimed by whoever finally remembers drawing it.
Steadily,
Booktrovert #900