The End is in Sight

It's a long way off, but in theory I will get there someday. Someday when I am middle aged if I keep pace and elderly if I don't, but someday nonetheless. When I began this project, finishing wasn't the goal at all. I thought maybe I'd get to around book 500, which will be an accomplishment in and of itself. This was definitely a project where the journey mattered much more than the destination. My aim really was to read books off of the list and see where I ended up. The list guided what I read, but I didn't expect to ever exhaust it.

Until one day when I calculated my reading speed and discovered that I should finish around age 32. When I tell people my projected end date, push this out to age 35, so I have a few years of flex time if I need it. I always give the caveat that this depends on keeping my current pace, which may not be at all sustainable (particularly if/when I go back to school, or if I lose my mind and decide to procreate).

Knowing that I might actually finish this project, and that it might happen in the relatively near future and not when I'm an 85-year-old woman in a nursing home who can't even remember the first 200 or so, has change the project in ways I did not expect.

Perhaps most obviously, I think it has helped me speed up my pace of reading. Some of that may be due to the fact that I am increasing my reading fitness. But being able to have a sense of the finish line, even one so far away, has played a role, too, I think. This is definitely a marathon, not a sprint, so keeping a sustainable pace matters a great deal in terms of my ability to actually finish. At the same time, knowing I won't be going forever has given me something to strive for, and has made speed take on a more tangible meaning, which has lead to increased speed.

I've also realized that I need to do a better job of reading authors who have a lot of works on the list. Starting to tackle Dickens and Coetzee has been a direct result of this knowledge, since they are the two with the most works on the list. I like to spread out works by the same author or in the same genre. Therefore, I know that I'll get to all Dickens eventually, which has meant that I need to start sprinkling him in if I don't want to end up having to read David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist back to back.

Similarly, I've started to tackle some of the more unpleasant or intimidating works on the list. Before, I never thought I'd actually have to read Moby Dick; now, it's only a matter of time. It's moved up in my mental queue, though I've not been able to face it yet (The Idiot was read because of this phenomenon).

The main consequence has been more subtle, and I'm not sure how to put it into words. It's more of a perspective change than anything else. The journey still matters way more than the destination. If it didn't, this would be both a pretty shallow project and a pretty unrewarding one; I don't think you'd be able to keep it up. At the same time, knowing the destination is there means the destination does matter more. Checking off books and see the number I've read climb is rewarding, and I've started setting short-term goals for numbers, which I hadn't done before.