When I finished writing the first draft of my PhD I stopped reading, for a long while. I don’t mean I didn’t read anything, but I went from reading well over a hundred books, many of them on theology, history, and philosophy, to barely reading at all. At least by my previous standards. In 2013, for instance, the year before I finished the first draft of my PhD, I read 193 books, according to my Goodreads account. Then, in 2014, I read only 71. My numbers would fluxuate from year to year, but eventually, they just started going down.
Of course, 2014 was also the year my twins were born, the year we moved back to the US from the UK, and the year one of my sons underwent two rounds of chemotherapy. Once I started teaching in 2017, even as a literature teacher, the amount I read continued to go down. For awhile I saw this as a failure. I was an allstar Bookit kid, earning plenty of free personal pan pizzas and tickets to Six Flags in St. Louis. So what happened?
Life certainly got in the way. I stopped being someone whose whole day revolved around reading and writing. I had kids to take care of and students to teach for eight hours a day. But still, was I letting myself off easy? I mean, how times did I re-watch “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation” over that time? How much time did I dedicate to playing “Breath of the Wild”? Recently, however, I’ve come to a new understanding that I think might help you too, if you’re anything like me.
Increasingly the world we live in is training us to gamefy our lives. And reading goals is certainly one way to do that. After all, I think it makes many of us feel accomplished to be able to say “I read X number of books this year.” But I know that for me, I was getting to a point where I was reading or re-reading books simply to meet my goal. I’d deliberately pick short, easily consumed books to make sure I hit my goal. I’d do a big reading push in November and over the Christmas Break, to make sure I hit my goal. This took the joy out of reading for me. So as much as the exhaustion of finishing the research for a major project, kids, cancer, and a transatlantic move certainly played their role in my decline, so had the gamefied attitude toward reading I had adopted.
This doesn’t mean, however, that I think reading goals are a bad thing. Especially if you haven’t seen yourself as a reader in the past setting yourself some kind of goal, even if its just to read one book this year and use something, a website, an app, a journal, to record the goal and then record your achievement of it can be really helpful. Reading is wonderful. It can be done for so many reasons and more people can do it now than ever before, so more people should read more than they do right now. But often what’s far more important than how much you read is what you read. There are trends right now that say all reading is good reading, especially for children. I’m not sure I agree with this. I think it is better to read good stories than to read bad ones. I think, if you’re capable of it (and more people are than think they are), it’s better to read Homer’s Iliad (in translation for most of us) than to read a graphic novel version of it. But I digress. The important thing for now is to decide what kind of goal makes sense for you.
Maybe you want to read all the books by a certain author and so you set yourself the goal of doing that, maybe not in a year, but just eventually. Maybe you want to read all six of Jane Austen’s novels in a year and so you decide to read one every two months. Maybe you just want to read a book every month. Honestly, the permutations are endless. The important thing is to set yourself a goal that’s attainable. Find books that delight you, that challenge you. Read classics, read beach reads, read poetry, read biographies. Just read, but don’t worry about reading a hundred books a year unless you think you’ll do that anyway.
For myself, I’ve set my goal for this year to read 52 books, one a week. And so long as it isn’t acedia that leads me not to reach that goal, it’ll be okay if I don’t. The important thing is that, so far, this year I’ve been absolutely loving reading again. I’m taking notes on theology and philosophy again. And I’m just delighting in fiction again. Below, I’ll list what I’ve read so far this year. But what I’d love to see from you is at least one book you’ve read so far this year that you’ve just loved. For me, I read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book for the first time and loved it. It was creepy and spooky and hopeful. But what about you? What’s something you’ve read this year that you just loved?
David’s 2024 Read and Currently Reading Lists (as of July 12, 2024):
1. Paradise by Dante, translated by Anthony Esolen
2. The Word Hoard: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen
3. Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite
4. 12 Virtues of a Good Teacher by Br. Luke M. Grande, F.S.C.
5. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
6. The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
7. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson
8. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter
9. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
10. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
11. North or Be Eaten! by Andrew Peterson
12. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
13. The Monster in the Hollows by Andrew Peterson
14. The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson
15. Wildwood by Colin Meloy
16. Emma by Jane Austen
17. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins
18. Cooked by Michael Polan
19. Saint Benedict’s Rule by St. Benedict, translated by Br. Patrick Barry, OSB
20. A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
21. Leisure the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, translated by translated by Alexander Dru
22. Dear Dante by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
23. Under Wildwood by Colin Meloy
24. Wildwood Imperium by Colin Meloy
25. St. Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton
26. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, translated by Scott Goins and Barbara H. Wyman
27. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
28. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
29. Letters from Lake Como by Romano Guardini, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley
30. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
31. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Currently Reading
Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Gwynne’s Grammar by N.M. Gwynne
The Catechism of the Catholic Church