The Zokutou Word Meter!

This is a pretty cool little thingamajig. Its a counter that you can place into your posts/projects etc. It was originally designed to display the proportion of words you have written for a project but is currently being popularly used by LibraryThingers to count off books they have read in a year vs. how much they are aiming to read. This has been combined with the "50 book challenge": the challenge to read 50 books in a calender year (or 75, or 100 etc.)

In 2004 I read 25 books (cover to cover). In 2005 I read 58. In 2006 I read 87 (86 of which were fiction!) which is kind of an excessive amount. So what should I aim for this year? I reckon about 50-odd fiction books and say around 10-odd non-fiction books, so let's say 65 books this year as a tough but reachable target.

Of course the reason this is difficult is that I'm doing a lot of reading for courses/research etc. which is not cover to cover and which takes up a good deal of reading time and mental energy. In that light 65 seems kind of ambitious, but oh well. Lets see what happens.

So far I have read 18 books in 2007. My Zokuto meter is as follows:

18 / 65 (27.7%)

Hmm. I wonder what other use we can put this meter to? Well if 66 days of the year have passed. Maybe we can make another meter that will allow us to show how much of my time to do the reading in has passed? The Zokuto meter would look like this:

66 / 365 (18.1%)

Aha! This would suggest that I am ahead in terms of my reading goals! Cool!

I am such a nerd!

IZ

Edit: Obviously there seems to be an issue that Zokuto is having with Blogger. The meter isn't displaying properly on my post even though it looks fine in the composing window. Hmm... how odd. In order to console myself, I have added the meters to the margin on the left, below my books stuff.