Kindling - Tracking Reading through Tetris

When I set out to do this blog I hadn’t expected that my highest traffic would come from entries about my bullet journal (I use the term “traffic” very loosely – imagine a dusty country road which sees a couple of horse buggies and a pickup truck pass by every week). But it does seem that bullet journals, or “bujos” are still pretty popular and I’d be happy to share one of my favourite entries – my reading tracker:

The usual reaction of a casual observer is a raised eyebrow and three steps backwards

Look at these two little white spots of failure

I always think it’s pretty self-explanatory until I show it to someone and they greet me with a “wtf” face, so I think this one needs a little bit of explanation.

Firstly, the title “Kindling” is easy to miss since it runs across both pages both pages. This is a result of a very corny metaphor that came to me around the time I turned thirty (which is when I started my bujo) and refers to the fact that I think reading is the kindling that starts the mind’s fire. I’ve posted before about how important I think reading is to a writer, so this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though perhaps as an eye-roll moment.

The basic premise of the entry is based on Tetris. Each colourful piece represents a particular reading medium (yes, I count audio books and will fight anyone who argues otherwise). Usually the threshold is about a half-hour of reading in the specific category, the notable exception being short stories where a single block represents a single short-story, even though it might take me anywhere between five and forty minutes to read one. The grey block that’s “blog/misc” is the loosest category, and I usually count this only if the reading is particularly involved or informative, but really it’s whatever I feel like (as you can see, I don’t often count it so it’s not exactly a “cheat” category).

One of the wonderful things about the way this graph is set up is that I use it as a way of self-manipulation, specifically exploiting my competitive nature. It’s a point of pride for me to avoid any gaps between the pieces until the last possible moment and to leave as few as possible before the “play area” fills up. Based on this, not only do I sometimes need to read a particular genre or medium in order to make sure I don’t leave any gaps, but sometimes I intentionally place pieces in order to push myself towards doing something.
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For example, if I find that I haven’t read a short story or a graphic novel recently, I could place an audio book or novel piece in such a way that the only pieces that would satisfy the remaining gap are the short story or graphic novel blocks. Boom! Suddenly I’ve found additional motivation to reach for those. Not to mention what’s going on in the far right part of the player area, where I leave an empty single block wide column that’s quite familiar to Tetris players. The only way to fill this one is with my most often neglected medium – poetry. I’ve never been a poetry connoisseur, and most of it admittedly flies right over my head (feel like the proverbial swine before a whole pile of pearls), so I tend to steer away from it. That said, I do occasionally enjoy it, and I find it to be a valuable literary exposure, so I have to find ways to read it, or I will be left with an unsightly gap in my log. This has worked out great over the last couple of years as I’ve discovered that I quite enjoy the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Wisława Szymborska, and I’ve got a lot of others on my to-read list.

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A couple of interesting observations from the spread that I included above:

• You can easily tell when I read non-fiction books because I don’t read them frequently so those cumbersome magenta square pieces come in clusters.
• The concentration of yellow “short story” pieces this year compared to the previous one is a result of a gifted subscription to the New Yorker which I scour for its fiction.
• The accumulation of audio book pieces and lack of novel pieces is a direct result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, since most of my novel reading time was on my commute to and from work, and that’s not been happening for the last six weeks.
• The graphic novel is sadly neglected and one of my reading goals is to turn this around, leaning more heavily on local libraries, once those are reopened.

One of the best parts about bullet journaling is that there are no rules and you can adapt anyone’s tracker or log to suit your needs. I hope you get inspired by this to track your own reading habits (the perpetual caveat being that you should avoid turning anything into a chore by tracking it), or you can combine this with the categories set out in my writing tracker and create a Tetris tracker for your writing instead. Or it can be on a completely unrelated topic – schoolwork, work, or hobbies. I think the colourful nature of this particular tracker can brighten up anyone’s journal.