Reading Habits
Do you keep track of your reading?
I never used to. I’d read sporadically and aimlessly. A cover that caught my eye. A recommendation that nudged me at just the right time. A few times an author became an obsession and I’d read a bunch of their work.
But, in 2018 my writing aspirations took a more serious turn (that’s another post topic) and with that I realized I had a lot more to read. As I dove into the literary world and the science fiction world in particular, my TBR list grew and grew and at some point in 2019 I almost gave up on the whole aspiration because I felt like I’d never know enough, have read enough, to feel valid as a writer.
This was silly. There’s validity to writing where you are at any point in your life. Especially for yourself. It’s a process. If you want it to be. It can also be an aimless meander. I think I’ve found a nice balance between the two.
In January 2020 I decided I’d aim to read a book a week. This is probably a low standard for most of my reading/writing peers. But it was a steep aspiration for me, as someone who never read with regularity.
Reading was never a habit for me, never part of my routine. It was maybe more a random assortment of unexpected curiosity driven flings.
Tracking reading wasn’t a pandemic thing, but it certainly was a nice distraction during those chaotic months. Ultimately I hit my goal, closing out the year with 54 books.
And then I stopped.
2021 was a chaotic year: a cross country move, my dad’s dementia, a divorce and single parenting. Even when I had the time, I couldn’t get my eyes to stay on the page. And even when I did that, I couldn’t get the words to process. I didn’t stop reading entirely, but it was so slow that I stopped tracking and therefore have little idea what I read that year.
I was hard on myself for this initially, but gradually began to understand that my brain can’t read (or write) past the fog of trauma. There was a physical process to it that basically shut down during this period of my life.
But gradually audiobooks crept in. I could do audiobooks for non-fiction, but for fiction I deplored it, having trouble keeping details of character and place names straight in my head while following a long with the story.
It turned out this was a skill I could learn though. One I learned through How to Train Your Dragon…
At some point in August 2021, my kiddo and I ventured on a roadtrip to NYC and I decided to look for kids’ audiobooks. How to Train Your Dragon came recommended to we gave it a shot and made it through the first two or three books on that round-trip and finished all twelve books over the next few month’s drives to school. After that came Percy Jackson, Sayantani DasGupta’s Kiranmala books and more.
And after a year of listening to middle grade/young adult novels my brain kind of figured it out and I started listening to adult fiction as well.
Through this time I hadn’t given up on physical books entirely, but I would start more books than I would finish, often reading a few chapters never coming back.
It wasn’t until the second half of 2024, after I was laid off for the second time in 12 months, that I finally had a chance to take a step back and reflect on what had happened to my reading aspirations from 2020. So I made two resolutions: finish at least 52 books by the end of the 2024 and finish as many of those unfinished books as you can.
And so that’s what I’ve done. Ending the year with 62 completed books, 14 of them I had started prior to 2024 and never finished.
While it’s nice to track the numbers and check boxes for meeting goals, the real benefit for me in tracking this is so that I can go back and think about what I’ve read and how it connects back to my life and my writing. Maybe even revisiting ideas in these books and bringing them up for discussion in the future...
