Not a resolution
I’m not sure if reading goals and resolutions are as popular as they used to be. For a while, it felt like at this time of year, I always saw a lot of social media posts about people’s reading stats for one year, and their plans for the next. Sheer numbers of books that they wanted to read, as well as bingo cards or checklists or plans to read more women or more books in translation or more graphic novels.
The first time I ever really thought about what I was reading in this way was in graduate school. It wasn’t that I suddenly made a bingo card of necessary books, just the awareness that there was so much to know. Not only in my particular area of literature, but in terms of the field of literature generally. I knew I wouldn’t have time to study all of it. There were whole swaths of things I never really got into – time periods, authors, major books that I’ve just never read. And in graduate school, that began to bother me.
I also started writing seriously in graduate school, and one of the things that was very much emphasized was that writers read. Not that I’d ever been reluctant to do that, but writing changed my relationship with reading. I started to read for how the trick was done, to educate myself as to craft. I made a point to keep up with what was new in my field, where the innovations were coming from. It became difficult, almost impossible, to turn off the part of my brain that was evaluating and taking mental notes.
I think it can be very valuable to choose to read outside of your comfort zone, or to decide to specifically focus on an area or author or subject matter. I think you can learn things not only about literature but about yourself when you do this – even just a clearer idea of what you like and what you don’t and why. I think it’s good to try new things, and to let yourself be surprised.
But this year, I’m not making any specific resolutions. I don’t have a topic that I want to seek out, and if I finally read Don Quixote or Anna Karenina or Ulysses it will be because I wanted to, not because of a sense of should. I’m trying to get back to the idea of reading for sheer pleasure, for happiness, for delight in living in someone else’s words for a while. Not that that means I’m only going to seek out light works or fluff (or that there would be anything wrong if I were) – I can take great pleasure in works I know will break my heart, and I’m contemplating a reread of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, which will cause multiple occasions of weeping. But I want to focus on reading as reading, as just me and the book and the words on the page, without it needing to be more than that to justify the time. It’s an anti-resolution, and we’ll see if I’m any better at keeping it than I am at keeping the other kind.