12,204

Last night marked the final night of my personal challenge to read 10,000 pages in 365 days/nights.

I reached that goal at the end of October, but kept plowing on... even to the very last night... staying up fairly late (well, for me... I won't embarrass myself and tell you what qualifies as "late" 10:40pm).

I guess I should end the suspense (because the "title"of the post and the graphic to the left is not enough)...

The final tally is ... 12,204 pages !!!

Which, even for us non-math whizzes, is an easy to figure out 22% (22.04%!) over the goal!

Considering I read just over 8,000 pages in 2006, I thought a 10k challenge would be... well, challenging!   

But not reaching the 10k goal was never in danger.  I sprinted out to a 13k+ pace early in the year and don't think I ever dipped below 12k... even as the days off started to pile up (ironically enough, some people only read on vacations... but trips to NJ/NY, Colorado, and Vegas were responsible for my biggest blocks of days off... which is totally fine with me... if travel is the reason for less reading... than let's have less reading!)

Given this final number of pages, I was considering what next year's goal should be.... two of my ideas ended up being pretty similar -- the "read more than last year" and the numerically pleasing "12345" page challenge -- so I am going to go with the latter... even though I am not sure how I am going to reach it, since I felt I read as much as I possibly could this past year... but I guess that would make it [gasp!] a challenge!

But this year's reading business is not done just quite yet.  I "owe" you one more book read in 2007... and then there's my big recap of the reading year, where I dole out my "best of" lists, etc.  So stay tuned... and then we're onto my 2008 1-2-3-4-5 Challenge... and, don't worry, I'm ditching the thermometer graphic!

Happy (Reading) New Year!