Cover to Cover

Today, my goal is to read The Information, by James Gleick, cover to cover.

Yesterday, I posted on Twitter:

Tomorrow, I’m trying an experiment: reading a book in a day! Help me choose?

and included a link to this two-question survey:

Quiet and The Information quickly emerged as the front-runners; The Information won out by a hair.

In attempting to do this, I was inspired not only by the posts linked in the survey, but also by Robin Sloan’s will to experiment and Ian Chan’s amazing run live-tweeting the World Series of Poker this past week. If poker can be that gripping, maybe reading can, too!

At 544 pages, I’ll need to read about 40 pages of The Information an hour in order to finish it before 10pm, assuming a 1-hour break somewhere in the middle. But since I’ll be reading it on Kindle for iPad, pages are sort of irrelevant, I suppose…I guess the goal is to read a certain percentage every hour? So, 7.7% per hour for 13 hours? I have a feeling that is not exactly how things are going to turn out, but I’m excited to find out how they do.

I’ll be posting updates and reactions throughout the day on Twitter at @dianakimball, dropping in here every couple of hours, and writing up the experience at the end. This is going to be a very interesting day…

  1. bustr reblogged this from rickwebb and added:
    I love this idea, and hope this will be live-tweeted (update: looks like it is!). Extreme book reading. I would have...
  2. rickwebb reblogged this from dianakimball and added:
    boy do I wish it was Martin Amis’ The Information.
  3. dianakimball posted this