My fourth attempt to kickstart the Ray Bradbury challenge. My customized version. Just to read books consistently. I have tried starting it three times before and eventually fell down the wagon. Being a perfectionist is a pain. It’s the ‘all-in-or-nothing’ attitude that doesn’t let me continue after a couple of hiccups. I started with one short story, one essay per day for 1000 days. I haven’t gone past 10-15 days each time.

This time it’s going to be different. I’m going to customise the challenge to my benefit.

• 1000 days of reading
• One short story everyday
• One novel running in parallel, a few pages everyday

The difference this time is that I do not aim to read on thousand consecutive days because I know that my work life and my personal life will get in the way. So I am going to give myself some leeway and ensure that there will not be a gap of more than 2 days wherever there is such a gap. But I will try to be consistent and consequent as much as possible. So after day 13 Wednesday, if I am not able to read on the Thursday and Friday, I will have to read something on a Saturday. That’s the idea. I don’t think I can fail in this plan because the intent behind this is not to push or challenge myself. Its just to build the habit of reading for pleasure. Once I complete this Thousand-Day challenge I intend to achieve few things.

• Self confidence, to start with. Confidence that I am able to consistently do an activity.
• Book Reading Habit. More the books, less the phone.
• I would have been exposed to a number of authors and their styles and therefore I will have a good selection of authors to dig down further.

By the end of this exercise, I would have gotten into the habit of reading long form books as well. From there I can further explore into essays or other forms of reading that interest me. But one thing I do wish to stick on is that I should read only what I want to read and not try to read the books that I feel I have to read. That is where I have been holding myself back. I started a few books which were widely discussed in social media and by booktubers etc. But I never had the drive to push through and complete those books because they were in my “have to” category and not yet in my “want to” category. I truly believe that over time, as and when I evolve as a person, my interests will also change and I will have the will and energy to read such books as well.

I feel that the opposite is also true. I am in a crossroads. I do want to explore and expand my horizon. I want to read beyond what I usually read which is Indian writing, historical fiction, contemporary literature of the regional languages. Nothing more. I have not read romance, I have not read fantasy, I have not read even Harry Potter, I have not read Little women, I have not read crime and punishment, I have not read any of the ‘landmark’ books that would qualify me as a reader amongst the the book reading community of the internet or of the social media. But any attempt to satisfy that or to go through the checklist is not helping me. On the contrary, it exhausts me and makes me feel that reading books as a chore. That has been my experience in the past so I do not want to go through the same journey again

I will track my progress this time. I will track the everyday short stories and the novels that I read. Possibly in a small notebook, mentioning the dates just to stand back and observe my journey and also helps to accumulate a collection of all the authors that I have been exposed to. I expect to go through at least 50 different authors. That would be a good motivation for me to continue reading the books. I could track this even in Google keep, Notion or in an Excel sheet, but I don’t know how consistent I will be. Let me start with this is and then based on how comfortable this is, I can transfer it to somewhere else as well. But this is my idea and today, my one day becomes day one. There will be a post on the day 1000.