The above image is my Reading Challenge in Good Reads.
I think this year I cannot complete my Reading challenge. I still have 7 books left to be completed, and as my 14th book, I took The Brothers Karamazov last month, a book which is vast in number of pages and also in the depth of characters and ideas.
Choosing that book opened up a lot of questions regarding these reading challenges, like,
- Why we have a challenge in the first place when we already love reading?
- How we became obsessed with completion and updating Goodreads?
- How we focused more on finishing chapters than truly engaging with them?
- Why do we just keep reading and reading until we reach the end of the page?
Out of all, the most important question is:
After reading a chapter, why do we not give sufficient time to understand that chapter and the characters involved in it?
For a book like The Brothers Karamazov, I feel that the above process is an essential thing to enjoy the reading process truly.
So after these thoughts, I decided to ditch the reading challenge altogether and decided that the only challenge for this year for me is completing The Brothers Karamazov and enjoying the process, understanding the nuances and getting my opinion and changing my stupid opinions if I have any.
But it's not a challenge I took up purely out of belief. Hope is not always a strategy; hope seems to me a belief, and it should be acted with actions based on some rational thinking, so I put a little mathematics there: I read for about 15–30 minutes each day and can complete around 2 chapters. If I keep that pace, I should be able to finish the book within the year and I thought there is more than enough time. I was proud that I was able to come up with statistical calculations on it.
But as we often say, at the end of the year, we get interesting plot twists. This month, I was pivoted to learning a new programming language, which is also super interesting and can improve my survival rate in this market economy. But that took up most of my 30 minutes of reading time and even some of the time I spent thinking about reading, writing, and books.
Because of that chaos, my statistical strategy which I believed in got destroyed, and now I go around telling people that I'll complete The Brothers Karamazov before my death. 😄
Anyhow, after removing the reading challenge barrier and moving towards the process of slow and consistent reading, every day there is an inflow of new ideas and new understandings about many things. If someone wants me to yap about The Brothers Karamazov, I can yap until my throat gets dry!
So this year, my only real challenge was to break free from the ruthless reading challenge I had imposed on myself, and I feel today that I have won that too ,by losing to the reading challenge.
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Karamazov Brothers