Book-A-Week

NOTE: This is not another post about writing a book in a week.  I'm not that skilled/ambitious.  You can find Stefan Milicevic’s excellent post about that here.

A few months ago I moved.  It was only twenty miles away, but it upset the delicate balance of my life enough that I lost track of some of my more established routines.  The one that has had the biggest impact on my life was my book-a-week regimen.

I started the book-a-week deal after being told for the umpteenth time how I “need to read a lot if I wanted to be a writer.”  It was my New Year's resolution, and for the first few weeks I thought it was going to be a total flop, like my resolution to finally ride an upside down roller coaster.  (That's just not going to happen, people.  I was not mean to be flipped upside down in a plastic chair, a good seventy-five feet above a questionable greenish-black pool, probably full of other people's vomit and sun glasses.)

At first I went overboard with the reading thing.  I was so absorbed in reading that I stopped writing.  That was almost a physical pain, like I'd cut off my own hand.  So I stopped reading altogether, and that was just as bad.  I opted for middle ground after that.  I went to the store, bought a journal, and made a list.  Books I’d always wanted to read (A Wrinkle in Time, Persuasions, Ender’s Game, The Host) and some that I had practically no interest in at all (pretty much anything by Charles Dickens.)  I wrote out the rules on the inside cover of the journal to remind me what I was supposed to be doing.

The Rules:

• No Re-reads.  If I've read it before, it doesn't count.

• No skipping pages to get to the good parts.  (No skipping to the end, either.  Sigh.)

• No banking books to skip weeks.  (I did make exceptions to this one when I went on vacation.)

• No book snobbery.  Every genre is fair game, and in fact, encouraged.

• Take lots of notes.

Then I went to it.  I collected my highlighters, got my books together, and picked a title off the list.  I gave myself a couple hours each day to get my reading in, usually at night after everyone else went to bed.  I approached it the way I would have if I were expected to write an essay on the book, keeping detailed notes in my journal (and in the margins of the books themselves, which is probably why my friends don’t ask to borrow books from me anymore.)

I read everything.  Classic literature.  Middle grade readers.  Young adult.  Steampunk.  Horror.  Romance.  Sci-fi.  Epic fantasy.  (Yes, even Charles Dickens.)  I traded back and forth through genres to keep things fresh.  I saved quotes.  I earmarked pages.  I cracked spines like a literary chiropractor.  I did my best to keep from breaking my own rules.  It was probably the best education I, as a writer, could have asked for.

And then came the move.  I lost track of my books.  It took a week to unpack them, and several more to figure out where to put them all.  My husband bought me a Kindle to help keep me on track, but it’s not easy to get back into something once you’re out of practice.  There’s a thousand excuses.  TV, Facebook, and I’ll be honest, playing video games with my son are probably my biggest distractions.  We’ve decided to take more trips to the park, which is better for both of us.  So I’m going for it.  I’m hitting the books hard.  Well, at least once a week.

I’m curious to know if anyone else out there has a book schedule they adhere to, and if so, what it entails.