The 274 Challenge

November 5, 2024

Dear reader, have you ever had a day where you simply woke up and said to yourself "What the everloving **** am I doing with my life?"
Well here I am, senior year, drowing in schoolwork, applications, clubs, and most strangely, a cumbersome amount of books. Books I haven't touched in...years. Books I love too, books that I bought with boundless joy and enthusiasm and a spark for life I have yet to recreate outside of those dusty, crowded second-hand bookstores.
And as I am perpetually torn asunder by my outstanding procrastination skills and my overwhelming desire to achieve, whenever I do idle away my time when I know I have things to do, it often just leaves me feeling empty inside
So here I am! Young and only somewhat illiterate with an early New Year's challenge for myself and my sanity:
Read Every. Single. One. You heard me! Every single book that I have currently checked out or bought without finishing, I shall read in the next 274 days.
Why 274 days? Why, it's 3/4ths of a year, silly! Who would want to go so slow?
Anyway, here's the first shelf of books (mostly library books) (those will be in bold) that I am set to tackle for the next month or so in no particular order at all:
  1. Sensor - Junji Ito
  2. Empire of the Vampire - Jay Kristoff
  3. The Long High Noon - Loren D. Estleman
  4. The Alchemy of Moonlight - David Ferraro
  5. A Magic Steeped in Poison - Judy I. Lin
  6. Flatland - Edwin A. Abbot
  7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  8. German All The Way - Ingeborg Lasting, Heidi Singer
  9. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R. Hofstadter
  10. The Manga Guide to Physics (yes, really) - Hideo Nitta, Keita Takatsu
  11. An Introduction to the Study of Insects - Donald J. Borror, Dwight M. DeLong, Charles A. Triplehorn
  12. A Textbook of Practical Astronomy - Jason John Nassau
What fun, amirite guys?
To be clear, I'll probably work in a left-right, top-down pattern for my bookshelf, then move onto the hoard in my closet.
Listen, I know this challenge is practically impossible, but if I did make it, how cool would it be? But I'm not gonna beat myself up about it. This is supposed to be fun, after all. I would also like to mention that if I do find a book practically impossible/boring/painful to read, I will drop it. I want to enjoy myself doing this, and I don't think torturing myself by trudging through an awful book will enlighten the course of my life. Nevertheless, I don't think that will happen very often, as the ones I'm most worried about are the library books, as I chose those a while ago in a rush to check out before closing time. The ones I buy for myself I'm often quite enthusiastic about.
So, if you are by any chance interested in my journey to do the impossible, I will most likely be updating every 2-3 days, depending how deep I am in homework. I'll update you guys on my progress, thoughts about the work, how I'm enjoying it and we'll see just how far I can get into my pile of reading material!