Why I Stopped Reading Books

And Why I Hope To Start Again

Goodreads in January encourages making a goal of how many books to read in the coming year. I never do that. To my mind, it’s like pledging how many hours I intend to be unavailable as a mother. I don’t think reading books is wrong, at all. I think that planning an abstract goal is counterproductive when it conflicts with another goal. I guess the amorphous notion of “reading books” is meaningless to me. Reading a specific book to learn about a specific topic, or even hoping to enjoy a genre of fiction, is enjoying life. But an arbitrary number doesn’t speak to me.

I like to read nonfiction. I like to learn new things. Full-length non-fiction is a wonderful way to take a deep dive into understanding something. The author inevitably has lived their subject and has a grasp of oit that is worth sharing. Some authors are magnificent, others not as spectacular, but almost universally worthwhile. I also learn fascinating unrelated tidbits. As I read, I take notes by hand in illegible script on random scraps of paper. From the collection of carefully folded scraps with attendant page numbers, I have been doing this since 2017.

I read a book on the American Revolution recently. I got the hardcover as a gift for my birthday in December 2021. It took me until somewhere around December 2023 to finish it. It was a marvelous book. But the time and energy I spent berating myself for how long it took me to finish it was draining and something I don’t want to repeat. So I decided to stop reading books. I even have a book I stopped midway.

I reframed my slowness to finish as an accomplishment that I read at all. I run a busy household 24/7, the only way households are run. Reading non-fiction requires discipline that I need for all my other endeavors. The reframing still falls flat.

Nevertheless, I could not bear to read books and not finish them. I started a book on Disraeli that I stopped reading; it was essentially out of date gossip. I bought it online hoping to learn about the politics of the Young Tories. Instead it was full of love affairs and criticism of his poetry. I profoundly don’t care. So I left that unread. I also ordered a book online written by Winston Churchill about his father Randolph. The font was tiny and the whole layout made reading it nearly impossible. I abandoned that as well. I am a huge fan of Winston Churchill. His father was a fan of Benjamin Disraeli. So, it was all connected. I think I bought both books during covid when libraries were a difficult thing to access. Other than those, I really dislike leaving a book unfinished.

So I made a decision to stop reading books. To compensate, I read a lot of Substack. I usually read the Wall Street Journal also, but recently, just Substack.

I read a piece, it might have been on Substack, where a mom discussed with another mom how she kept her intellectual side engaged while raising young children. She said that she read books and discussed them with a friend. At first, her vignette resonated with me. But then it didn’t. I don’t make goals to stay intellectually engaged; I fundamentally am a person who loves to learn, loves to read. If I were left alone in a room with only signs to read, I would come up with a pattern or a motivation that linked them or separated them into categories. I don’t worry about my mind atrophying. I struggle with the logistics of doing everything I’d like to do. I wrote a blog four (five?) times a week for eighteen months. That was part of my turning-forty ‘what will i do without a baby?’ strategy. I was practicing writing so that when the kids grow up I will be writing well enough to get a job doing that. (To explain the commitment of a blog vs. Goodreads)

So, in order to avoid my version of failure-it’s an extremely broad definition-I stopped reading. I do hope to start again. After all, the point of reading is to read, not to count how long it took or how many books I finished.