The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Yea I read the first book in 2023, so it couldn't compete on this list. Would have been a hard decision otherwise.
I'm pretty happy with it. It's not the most I've read: I read 95 books in 2020, but the pandemic and being unemployed the summer before I started grad school meant that I had a good three months with nothing to do but read, so I feel like that year was an exception. I also read a few graded spanish readers that year, and much more "snappy" non-fiction (think things like atomic habits or Cal Newport) which I now find not very appealing.
Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.
2020 was my best year as well funnily enough, but even then I maxed out at 35 books. I feel like at that level I don't retain a whole lot, although writing some mini-reviews like you have seems like a good idea. Thinking about my average day, there's plenty of space to squeeze in more reading without giving up anything in particular. Your posts have given me some motivation!
Glad I could help. The 2-3 paragraph reviews (and longer content on substack) are absolutely essential for retaining what I read.
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