Sometime around Christmas, I realized that I was spending a lot of time noodling around on my iPhone, and not very much time browsing my bookshelves. This might be fine, because as Michael says, there must be some sort of neurological pay-off for doing all those games or they wouldn’t suck us in so easily.

But I’ve noticed there’s a bit of a cost to all this small-screen time. I used to lose entire afternoons to a good book. Now I’m lucky if I’m able to lose an hour.

Picking up books and reading them is a rather fundamental practice for writers.

This year, I resolved to read more mindfully in an attempt to build my attention span back up. I was hunting around the Intertubes to see if anyone had good ideas for managing a rather vague resolution to read more when I stumbled upon Reading in Winter’s 2014 Book Bingo Reading Challenge.  I signed up right away.

Imagine sorting your to-read pile into a Bingo scorecard.

That’s what this reading competition does. Contestants are asked to read various numbers of books from several different genres, as well as up to 15 books of their choice from their To Be Read (TBR) pile.

As my To-Read list on Goodreads currently boasts 248 entries, I thought this might be an excellent way to motivate myself to browse through the books on my shelves and maybe read a few things I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. You can win by completing a row across or up and down, just as you would in a regular game of Bingo, but only the Most Awesome Readers will be able to read ALL THE BOOKS. And yes, I intend to be Most Awesome.

That’s why I made a fancy little scorecard to track my reading.

As you can see, I’ve made some progress this year, although I can’t help but feel that the old me would have read ALL THE BOOKS by now.

External accountability is a marvelous incentive, and my reading brain needs the exercise.

So periodically I’ll post my progress here on Boston Writers.

I’d love to also promise to review the books for you, but the next period of my life is going to be consumed with movers, painters, floorers, plumbers, electricians, and six-year-olds fretting about keeping their Top Secret Dragon Lair secure with all these workers milling about. Whatever spare time I have to write is most likely going to be spent improving my craft, rather than critiquing the craft of others.

Related Links:

• Challenge: Anne & Kristilyn’s 2014 Book Bingo Reading Challenge (Reading in Winter)
• I have CDO t-shirt (Wireless Catalog)