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 I started a book on Disraeli that I stopped reading; it was essentially out of date gossip.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.
I hope so too. There’s nothing like not being able to wait to get back to a good book.
Books are time sinks. They’re hard to really read if you don’t have time to give them the full time, attention, and love they might deserve. Audio books do wonders but still are time sinks. With a busy life, it’s just tough. I understand.