♚ Welcome to the Newgrounds Reading Challenge 2020 ♚

NG's biggest and nastiest brains are coming together once again in the pursuit of KNOWLEDGE. Throw those glasses in the bin cuz this time it's 2020.

Whether you're already a dangerously smart bilbiomaniac or one of the unspeakable 24% and want to make a change, the Lit-Squad welcomes all. Setting a target and working at it each month is a sure fire way to achieve your goals and build good habits.

How it goes:

1. Make an initial post stating how many books you're aiming to read for the year.
2. Read some books.
3. Post about it and see your progress tracked in monthly updates.

I'll @ you near the end of each month as a friendly reminder. Reviews / summaries / comments / whatever of the books you read are appreciated but not mandatory.

Guideline / FAQ:

• What counts as a book? Do comics / manga / audio books etc. count? This is a personal goal and not a standardized test - so whatever you want to count, counts.

• What goal should I set? Whatever you think is genuinely, realistically achievable without being super easy. Hitting deadlines and making progress is an excellent motivator. Realizing you're never gonna make it is decidedly not.

• Do I need to set a goal? A goal is heavily encouraged if you want to read more, but not mandatory. Feel free to post if you don't want to take part in the challenge but have a book to share, too.

Remember the goal in itself isn't the purpose though, many users in previous years (including yours truly) haven't hit their goals, but still read more than they otherwise would have which is what really counts.

Old threads: ★ 2017 ★ | ♥ 2018 ♥ | ♜ 2019 ♜

Welcome to the club suckas, stay cozy and happy reading

First post! Ebic Bred! Also, 15 books is my goal this time. I'll probably do more...

I didn't reach last year's goal, not by a long shot. I'm not gonna let that discourage me, though. I read a lot as (more of) a kid, but I think I've slowly been getting back into it the past couple of years, though not as much as I'd like. I'm constantly craving books now and I wanna try and get 15 this year. I'll take some tips and things I learned last year and try to apply them in order to develop good reading habits to get me to the goal. Hope it's not too late yet to develop my big brain.

Sign me up, captain, and I'll set sail with the rest of the litfam!

Numbered goals are a horrific brain poison that actively stopped me reading longer stuff I've had sat waiting to start for ages last year. Just starting to write reviews on Goodreads whenever I finish something has been far more motivating.

Put me down for a completely arbitrary 10 just so I'm on the board.

Six Hunnerd

It is time. My goal is ten books this year.

I think I might have started this on the 31st but I finished it today, so it's going on the list.

1. The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

I've been reading Preston & Child's work chronologically, from Relic onwards, and while I have been enjoying it all I always thought their other work lacked a certain something that both Relic and Reliquary had. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and having now read The Cabinet of Curiosities, I'm still not certain, but whatever it is, Cabinet has it, because it's their best work since Relic itself.

The book is, for lack of a better word, a bit MCU-y. While technically a standalone work about an investigation into a 19th century serial killer after a series of identical murders occur in modern day New York, the book reunites Special Agent Pendergast and journalist Bill Smithback from the Relic novels, as well as archaeologist Nora Kelly from Thunderhead. Preston & Child's books have never been shy about taking part in a shared universe, but it's usually limited to small nods here and there, and while I really enjoyed seeing all these characters again I'm not sure how well the book would read in isolation. Smithback in particular does little to endear himself to the reader in this novel, and the sequences in which he's in peril later in the book might not hit quite the same way if you don't already have a fondness for him from previous appearences.

This is just about the only caveat I have though, because everything else is excellent. The mystery twists and turns constantly, the pace is breakneck and while it is the longest of their works I've read so far, it doesn't feel even half of its 620+ pages. As to that special something that sets it apart from their other work, at first I thought it might be the returning Pendergast, as while characters have always been Preston & Child's strongsuit he towers above the rest, an iconic law man up there with the likes of Dale Cooper, which is about the highest praise I can give.

Thinking further though, I think it's actually the city itself. The dusty museum archives full of decaying treasures, the filthy slums with secrets buried beneath their foundations, the grand townhouses ravaged by time and fallen into ruin. They all just make for a far more compelling backdrop than the isolated, more natural settings of a lot of the authors' other work.

Just really excellent stuff. So glad to have stumbled into these guys last year, because I'm 7 books deep into their work now and there hasn't been a dud yet. Can't wait to read the next one.

Im going for 18. Hopefully will put the time in. When i saw the link in the other thread i actually thought this thread might be called crave books lol and i thought that craving them would help me read moe

Hi! Put me down for 25. I can tell this year is gonna be a busy one.

I'll be reading some Japanese manga as a way of helping me learn the language.

Doraemon (0)

Pocket Monsters SPECIAL Vol.1

Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1

These are currently on my order list, the first two should be here later this month, the last one a bit later, my goal is to get through them, and be able to learn to read them with some greater understanding.

I both agree and disagree. I definitely massively prioritized short books last year and want to focus on longer volumes this time. On the other hand, having the numeric goal made me read vastly more across the board than I otherwise would have, and now that I'm more into the habit I might be better equipped to get through bigger volumes without quitting. I think a numeric goal is good so long as a high score isn't the priority. It's more about having a deadline to keep pace than trying to maximize the numbers.

I was thinking of imposing (on myself) a metric of pages read rather than whole books, with every 400 or whatever pages counting as one point toward my goal, so individual book length is rendered mostly irrelevant. Also considered only making books over 1k pages long valid for a few months.

If anyone's got Christmas money to burn the Folio Society New Year sale is pretty good.

This time I set my goal to 13 books. After having read 13 books last year it would be silly to go back, right? Also, I finished a book yesterday, so I will post about it tomorrow.

Imma set my goal at 24 this year; just in case. There's a list of stuff that's planned this year and not sure how reading will be fitted in so 24 it is.

My holidays focused on a lot of book receiving this year so I have a fresh arsenal of new material in my personal library. I don't believe I had a goal last year, but this time round I'll shoot for ten. I think having a goal this year may push me a bit more to stay on the reading wagon.

Turns out I got majorly confused. I finished the book LAST YEAR and already posted about it in the old thread. Holy shit...

It's only too late once the desire to develop has been lost. You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want, otherwise everyone would choose to want the healthiest and most successful things to the same extent as those most aggressively perusing them.

What I mean is, a brain desiring to embiggen itself cannot be stopped. The sincere desire to improve isn't a given, it's actually a gift in itself.

The ones I want were already sold out, thank frick. Your attempt to bankrupt me has failed.

Dang dude, your brain must be sagging under its own enormitude. Or maybe all those christmas treats have you lagging.

Welcome aboard! It seems to be extremely common for people to be avid readers in their younger years but lose the habit completely in adulthood - I think school is obviously not at all conductive to building a reading habit or the related desire to continue learning, it overwhelmingly achieves the opposite. 

As for the focus and comprehension, I think that's something of a skill in itself that can be honed. My ability to focus on reading, both in extended periods and in short bursts, has definitely improved since I started doing these threads. I still have some trouble with distractibility, but I don't generally have the issue of absorbing what I do read which I originally did.

What's everyone's opinion on the "lindy effect" as it pertains to reading?

I'd seen people talking about it for a while but always in the context of cringey e-peen one-upmanship, using it to brag about how the books they read are superior to what others read, which is so juvenile I never really looked into it further. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I read up on it, and while its loudest advocates might all be big dorks, the concept itself is interesting.

Basically, the idea is that for non-perishable things like ideology, technology or indeed books, life expectancy increases with age rather than decreases as with biological or other perishable things.

So if a book has been in print for 50 years, it's very likely to remain in print for another 50, and crucially far more likely to remain in print than the average book published today. As such the older a book is, the more likely it is to both still be relevant now, but to remain relevant for your lifetime.

Therefore when choosing what to read you're far better off choosing those works that have stood the test of time than the ephemera of the present day, which statistically you're far less likely to remember or find meaning or significance in further down the line.

It's common sense really, the whole "90% of everything is shit" thing. Given enough time the 90% is forgotten and the 10% brought forward. Just interesting to see the statistical explanation behind it.

I'm still going to ignore the advice and choose my reading based entirely of there being naked women being harassed by giant crabs on the cover or a blurb that mentions a murderous haunted owl or whatever though.

I'm taking @Absurd-Ditties advice.

The one about pincer crab titties, not about how old books are likely to be good reads thus stay in print, and stay in print because they are good reads.

I'm setting a goal of twelve. I've started Hard Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World. It has unicorns.

Thanks for keeping this going man :)

I'm going for six books again. I made it last year, and it seems like it would remain a good achievable goal.

Put me down for 20 in 2020.

More than my 2019 goal but I'm not sure reading just over 2 books per month is a sustainable pace for me so I'll stick below what my 2019 total was. Lately I've been on a reading kick but there are times when I don't read much at all (See: last September).

Already 40% into Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Well then, this is an interesting challenge. I don't really have a goal number of books to read set, so I'm just gonna read as much as I can. I finished 'Iron Man: Tony Iommi' a month or so back, read that in 2 days, I love metal and Sabbath so it was a particularly engrossing read. I also read 'American Hardcore' around the same time too, and was especially appreciative of the neutral bias of the book and how it lambasted MaximumRocknRoll as a yellow publication filled with leftist ex hippies that wanted to brainwash impressionable punks with San Francisco politics and shat on everything that was related to heavy metal or the right in any way. I also read Trainspotting as well around in December when I was coming off heroin, a little hard to read due to the heavy scots dialect, but once I started to read it out loud in my brain, it started making sense. Currently I'm reading You Can't Win by Jack Black (not the one you think), The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen along with The Black Book of Communism. I might reread Brave New World and 1984 soon, just to remind me of what the hell is going on, speaking of dystopian books, I should get Fahrenheit 451 soon.

Put me down for 15 books this year.

I didn't get close to 30 books last year so I'll set a goal of 24 this year and try to smash it.

Actually, taking that back. I forgot that I have to start studying for the PSAT this year. Put me down for 8

Aiming for 25 this year. I know that I didn't hit my goal for 2019, but I want to really try to read a lot this year.

An interesting idea and it makes sense, but I'm not entirely convinced. I'm reminded of the fact natural selection doesn't select for intelligence or any other subjectively desirable trait, only for the ability to survive. The same happens with dawkinsian memes, the most successful ideas aren't the best or most truthful, just the most efficient at spreading. Ergo the most enduring book isn't necessarily the 'most' of any other metric, and whatever it is you're able to connect with may not be a memetically favorable trait.

With non-fiction I go for topics that interest me with little notice of when it was released. When I read fiction though I definitely do gravitate toward classics rather than current stuff and it's basically for this reason, although I didn't codify it in these terms. Old stuff that survived is likely some of the best shit of its time, I'll wait until time selects the best shit of the present. That's just the approach that appeals to me and has proved rewarding, but I still gotta mix in some trash. You never know what might click with you deepest but you can follow where your own tastes lead.

I think anyone laying down concrete rules about what they'll consume are doing it wrong. Like the couple of dips I've encountered who say outright that they only watch films from the criterion collection. Basically "I only let other people choose what I like and watch" because they're too lame to risk trusting their own taste and losing some imagined prestige.

tl;dr gotta b tru 2 urself

It's also worth noting that there's astronomically more active creative people now than at any other point in history, just statistically speaking if you consumed all known media tonight chances are your favorites would be predominantly from within the last couple decades. Quality comes with quantity.

This thread should try out Brandon Sanderson's Path of Kings' series.I don't usually read much but this one is a good exception.

Well Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1 was the first book to turn up, so I'll be going through that, and translating it, maybe by next month, I'll be able to read a few pages without refering to notes!

The closest things i've read to a book in the recent years are anime subtitles and programming documentation.