With the month of January complete, it’s time to reflect on the progress I’ve made with my 2024 Reading Goals. See below for a breakdown of Average Pages Read Per Day, Finished Books, and Book Organization.
Average Pages Read Per Day
My goal for 2024 is to read at least 10 pages per day. Here are the stats for the month:
- 22 pages per day average for the month (31 days)
- Read 18 days (56% of month)
- 39 pages per reading day
On days that I’m reading, I’m typically reading more than 10 pages, which in turn makes up for the days I’m not reading.
I’m planning on maintaining these days read in the month of February. We’ll see what it does with the stats with fewer days in the month.
Books
Throughout the month, I read five books.
I started one, continued reading one, and finished three. Below are recaps of the books I finished.
Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R. L. Stine – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I started Welcome to Dead House back in October 2023. I read it for a few days and then dropped it. I picked it back up at the beginning of January and finished it in one sitting. The main characters Amanda and Josh moved into a creepy, new-to-them home. Once they met friends in the neighborhood things became a little predictable with foreshadowing what actually happened to the area and the people who lived there. The ending threw me for a loop, so I was glad I was able to be surprised by a kid’s book still.
Welcome to Dead House was one of the books I picked up in a Facebook Marketplace haul ahead of the new Goosebumps show last fall. The copy that I read was listed on my eBay store and sold in two weeks!
Fresh Ink Edited by Lamar Giles – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I also started Fresh Ink last fall as I was preparing to assign it to 9th graders. I ended up reading a majority of it alongside my students. The collection of diverse short stories provided students with windows, mirrors, or sliding glass doors with who they read about in the stories.
In addition to “normal” short stories, the anthology includes a screenplay from Walter Dean Myers with “Tags” and a graphic novel short story with “Paladin/Samurai” from Gene Luen Yang and illustrations from Thien Pham.
My favorite piece of writing in the anthology was the “Foreword” written by Lamar Giles because I found the piece to be extremely powerful, especially in so few words. He brings up his personal experiences of not seeing himself in literature and how the anthology provides people like him a chance to see themselves in stories. My students and I read through this piece a handful of times to look at how he utilized italics and capital letters to get his point across.
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was another text I read alongside students. Tenth graders were assigned this text towards the end of 2023. This is one of my favorite texts to teach due to the relevance and timeliness in today’s world. It also has topics that students are still figuring out how to interact with in their day-to-day such as identity, community, and finding their voice.
The Hate U Give was a re-read for me as I’ve now read it a handful of times. I enjoy each read of it because I always pick up something new with Starr’s story in the wake of one of her childhood friends being shot dead by a police officer on a traffic stop.
Organization
One of my goals for 2024 is to organize all of the books my wife and I own. This is a large goal and task. We have a room in our home that we envision called “The Record Room.” Once completed the room will have books on the bookshelves, records organized underneath, and the record player hooked up.
The reality is that the basement is where the majority of our books are stored in moving boxes. I will spare you a picture of that mountain of boxes and books.
This month I was able to go through one box which had 25 books inside.
For Box 1, I added 23 books to the Record Room shelves. One was placed in another bookshelf I have for education-related books. One book is heading to my Classroom Library.
January was an awesome month of reading! I am happy to be re-establishing a reading habit. I’m looking forward to continuing the progress into February.
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