About

What is One Million Pages?

I’ve always had an affinity for books. A bound-paper purist, I have actively staved off purchasing any iteration of e-reader – there is something tangibly magical about holding a book in your hands, feeling its weight, and physically flipping its pages. Walking into a bookstore feels the same as walking into an airplane; browsing for a book is like browsing vacation spots – the exhilaration of knowing you can be transported anywhere you’d like to go.

Between my love of physical books and my inability to not duck into any bookstore I pass, I’ve developed a penchant for buying way more books than I actually get around to reading. I have bookcases stuffed full of untouched content, piles of I’ll-read-this-nexts on my desk, and four books I’m actively reading at the same time in any given moment on my nightstand.

In 2020, I decided to start a book journal and track my reading habits: how often I read, how long I was reading, what kinds of authors (gender, race, orientation, identity, etc.) I was picking up, the genres of books I was grabbing, etc. While monitoring these trends throughout the year, I made a conscious emphasis to diversify my reading.

At the end of the year, I looked back and saw that I spent more time picking out what I was reading than I did actually just reading. Between that and no motivation at all to read during the pandemic, I feel unfulfilled in my reading and as if I wasted the year.

So, I decided to add an element to my book journal: page count.

Going forward, I don’t want to just ‘screen’ content. I want to absorb content. “One million pages” sounded like a reasonable goal when the thought popped into my head. Books come in all shapes and sizes, but an average book has some length to it, right? It shouldn’t be that hard, I thought.

After doing some research (a couple Google searches), I came across a Reddit post from a guy who calls himself an average reader saying he gets through 40,000 pages per year. At that rate, it would take 25 years to get through 1,000,000 pages.

I, too, consider myself an average reader – but, with my lack of motivation during the pandemic in 2020, I got nowhere near 40,000 pages last year.

Inherently, I’m an impatient person when it comes to goals. In 25 years, I will be 52-years-old. Not only am I impatient when it comes to goals, I am also over-ambitious when setting them.

That brings us to: an average reader with an above-average goal. I am going to read 1,000,000 pages in ten years. When the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2030, I will be rounding out the decade at 35-years-old and with one million pages under my belt.

One Million Pages is my space for tracking my journey and sharing my thoughts along the way.

Happy Reading!