Book Scheduler 📚📆

My reading schedule is almost as bad as my blogging schedule… I'll read books in shrapnel bursts of 300 pages in two days. If my tome longer than 300 pages though, it'll be another two years before I even open it again :(

I found some cool bookmarks at a stationary shop on my trip to London though (still need to write about that trip…)

And I've been using them to be consistent with daily readings this last month. The thing is, classes are about to start, and I wanted to make a calculator for making realistic goals for reading road markers.

So I made an Rscript that cuts up books into chunks for each week. I read modern books at ~60 pages per hour, so it uses that metric for cutting the book into daily chunks of reading sessions.

The script takes input from the user so you don't have to randomly stop in the middle of a chapter to make the page limits more "semantic" with the structure of the book.

I open up the table of contents of my \*autographed\* copy of Before the Storm, and follow along with the script:

$ ./buch.R 517
MO      DI      MI      DO      FR      SA      SO
57      114     171     228     285     342     513
Get to p.57: 61
Get to p.114: 120
Get to p.171: 171
Get to p.228: 201,247
247
Get to p.285: 299
Get to p.342: 333,356 # script selects the closest
333
Get to p.513: 517
SCHEDULE:
MO: pp. 1-61
DI: pp. 61-120
MI: pp. 120-171
DO: pp. 171-247
FR: pp. 247-299
SA: pp. 299-333
SO: pp. 333-517

It also takes a second argument of a different pages per hour for more complicated codices, extending the book by more weeks when necessary. Here's the two week schedule from my (unautographed) copy of Crime and Punishment:

./buch.R 522 30
MO      DI      MI      DO      FR      SA      SO
29      58      87      116     145     174     261
290     319     348     377     406     435     522
Get to p.29: 25
Get to p.58: 61
Get to p.87: 85
Get to p.116: 112
Get to p.145: 149
Get to p.174: 187
Get to p.261: 269
Get to p.290: 293
Get to p.319: 316
Get to p.348: 343
Get to p.377: 372
Get to p.406: 417
Get to p.435: 440
Get to p.522: 522
SCHEDULE:
MO: pp. 1-25, 269-293
DI: pp. 25-61, 293-316
MI: pp. 61-85, 316-343
DO: pp. 85-112, 343-372
FR: pp. 112-149, 372-417
SA: pp. 149-187, 417-440
SO: pp. 187-269, 440-522

It's an easy script to spits out the schedule for me to fill in and obey IRL.

Unfortunately, until publishers become as cool as European negative number floors, there's a certain amount of prologues in the form of Roman numerals that I can't account for in the first session's reading.

All the same, it's good to be reading more, and I'm hoping to be writing more here too. I'm moving this site over to Zola as a holding action until I can dream up a better j3s-core site generator than what I made in 2023.

My tastes have changed a lot since then: I don't hate Hugo anymore, I'm making sites for my friends/clubs in Zola, and I'm even using the shift key in my writing again!

It's time to stretch out once more and reach those ambitions…