April 22, 2025

Look 113: Gone streakin'

Fellow angler,

I’m tired. That’s a general statement of life but also a result of me having walked about 30 miles in the past 3 days (>60,000 steps).

That walking is because of the Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl, an annual one-week event where cool people visit as many of the 26 participating bookstores as they can to collect stamps, culminating in an after-party (on Independent Bookstore Day) where you can win prizes (from those same bookstores) based on how many bookstores you visit.

This weekend, Lauren (have I mentioned her? she’s my wife so she’ll pop up sometimes) and I spent 8+ hours walking and shopping for books.

If you want to know more about the crawl, Lauren will probably post about it next month on her blog. Here’s last year’s recap to tide you over.

Anyway, all that lovely story was a segue into this post about how I’ve given up on reading.

To read or not to read

One of my goals at the start of this year was to read more regularly than I did last year. I wanted to read at least one page every day.

And I did! I started the year with a 97-day streak of reading at least one daily page. Then…

As I said last month, I realized that reading every day was cool but not one of my biggest priorities. Then two weeks ago I had a busy Monday and found myself up past midnight crafting a newsletter that you fine people could easily skim and delete.

As midnight approached, I realized I hadn’t read that day. I wondered if I should stop staring blankly at my screen, read a page, and return to wondering why I thought I could ever be a successful writer.

I decided to finish writing and lose my reading streak. It did hurt. I was so close to 100 days and Lauren (see there she is again) had just lost her similar-length reading streak. I finally had something to brag about. But at the end of the day, I realized that pulling my limited energy and time away from writing — so I could say I read a single page that I’d probably forget by the time I went back to the book the next day anyway — wasn’t doing enough for me.

Much like Chocolate Boy in Hey Arnold!, I craved the satisfaction of that little flame emoji my reading tracker shows when I keep my streak.

Chocolate boy

This is an aside. Wikipedia tells me that Hey Arnold! aired from 1996 to 2004. Since most of you reading this are either friends of my mother or younger coworkers who (against all logic) find my strangeness endearing, you likely didn’t watch a lot of Hey Arnold! growing up. If that describes you, you may find this context useful:

Chocolate Boy had an uncontrollable craving for chocolate and it was indeed bad for him. His parents forbade him from eating chocolate, which only made the sweet release of the cocoa even more desirable. Long story short, Arnold helped him to at least temporarily kick the habit and switch to radishes.

Coming to a point (much like my head)

I did read the next day to start a new streak. I think I went one week before I missed another day. I’ve now missed a few days since that streak ended. However, I’m finding that the streak did its job.

While I don’t read every day, those 97 days of streaking did the more important work of helping me rebuild a habit. Because I needed my daily page, I started to pay attention to my spare moments to see how I could fit in a little reading throughout the day.

I paid more attention to what I chose to read. Instead of picking up books that felt popular or like something I should read — even though I wouldn’t realistically enjoy reading them — I focused on books that truly interested me enough to read. If I got a book from the library and realized I didn’t like it after 50 to 100 pages, I returned the book and moved on.

Add in the reduced stress I didn’t realize I’d created from having to go into my book app every day to update my reading progress and failing to reach 100 days turned out pretty well, right?

2 books to consider

You can find the books I read on StoryGraph. Two books I enjoyed:

• Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa: A simple, touching story about a man who sleepwalks through life until an older woman makes him rethink how he judges people.

• Dr. Calhoun's Mousery by Lee Alan Dugatkin: A biography about a pioneering scientist who studied the social relationships in rat and mouse societies over multiple generations.

Title song

Today’s post is brought to you by a lesser-known song, Gone Shootin’, by the best band that has ever graced this once-fine planet: AC/DC.

What appears initially like a song about a couple having an argument and breaking up, is probably actually about a woman who’s been lost to her drug addiction.

AC/DC singer and lyricist Bon Scott was a sneaky good writer and while there are plenty of straightforward and crass songs, he also mixes in a healthy share of double entendres. Multiple of his songs also chronicle the challenges of trying to make it as a professional musician.

One clever line from Gone Shootin’: Backed her favorite nag, but she could never win — where nag is slang for horse and horse is a slang term for heroin.

Unrelated, the bass line of this song was the inspiration for the theme song of Beavis and Butthead. And while some people will read that as further evidence AC/DC is simply a crass band, they’re haters.

Until next time,

Happy fishing!