Re-Thinking My Reading (Yet Again)
At the beginning of this year I committed myself to taking my reading more seriously. This is not to say that I wasn’t paying attention to my reading before, but rather to say that I wanted to hold myself accountable to read more critically so that I read for understanding, both broadening and deepening what I take from the books I read. (I’d say that regular readers of this site know that I return again and again to the question how and what I want to read, but I know that there are precious few regular readers!) That re-commitment is manifested most concretely in the reading notes that I’m publishing here on this site. I see these notes not as critical reviews of the books but rather as collections of insights that I want to take with me.
After three months, I feel pretty good about the attention I’m giving to my reading. The exercise of taking those notes has helped me to build a knowledge base from each of the books. But I’m thinking now that I want to add more structure to the reading. I’m motivated here by two concerns.
First, on any particular day I’ll read from several different books, and the list of books reflected in those reading notes make it clear that I’ve been reading a wide variety of topics. Moreover, there’s been little structure in my decisions about which books to read — often times I’ve picked up a book because another author I’m reading recommends it as a good example of fill in the blank here, even if before reading that recommendation I really had no particular interested in the topic recommended. While I appreciate the somewhat serendipitous connections and relationships I find across the apparently different worlds of these books, I’m coming out of my reading with a rather shallow set of unconnected facts and insights, each of them important and/or interesting in itself but with no real coherence to the collection as a whole. Rather like speed dating, I suppose, except without the further step of spending more time and more quality time with a particular topic.
Second — and this is really the more pressing concern — I want my reading to help me live more constructively and authentically in the particular world of today. As I read the news, I’m forced to admit that there are news stories and journalistic analyses of current events that as recently as six months ago I would have dismissed as alarmist hyperbole. But I don’t see all that much hyperbole anymore. It’s not that we’re not responding to the challenge: we’re contributing to organizations that are resisting, we’re participating in protests, we’ve moved our support of news organizations from publications like the WaPost to others like ProPublica, The Guardian, and Talking Points Memo. All of that, I think, is good. But I want my reading to push me to think more critically about how I’m living in the world.
My plan, then, is to focus on the lives and work of individuals who have faced challanges somewhat like the ones that we’re facing. I want to read what these people wrote, and I also want to learn more about how they lived in the world. I’ve already read writings of some of these people, some more than others. I’m already somewhat familiar of the lives that they led, some more than others. But I want to know more. I also hope to learn something by putting them in conversation with each other and, in some cases, reading and thinking about how they learned from and challenged each other.
You can get a hint of this revised plan in the list of books I’m currently reading. That list, appropriately enough, is now in the entry for April 2025; if you’re reading this post later on (and if I’ve maintained my commitment to this project), you can find it in the entry for whatever month you’re reading this.
The list of people? Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X. (A note to the rare person reading this – please feel free to suggest someone else to put on this list.) In the interest of my health, I’m leaving room for at least one other book — call it an attentive distraction — in the mix. I can’t live in a dystopian world all of the time. But I think I can live more responsibly in the world as it exists today.