The Habit Of Reading

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When I was an undergraduate, I loved being an English major because I could do my school work just by taking a novel and going to read it outside somewhere.  I had a few favorite spots, like the courtyard outside the Benton Museum with its tall oaks, fountain, and statue of Bacchus, or this hidden courtyard outside the Young Building which always smelled of the katsura trees planted there.

In grad school in California, there were several great coffee shops where I used to love to read, especially this place called Café Mokka.  I’d drink way too much coffee, read, and write letters to people back east.

In the early years of my teaching career, I used to assign tasks to myself, mostly to fill in gaps.  One winter I read all the Shakespeare plays I had never read, about twenty-five in all, even Cymbeline and Coriolanus.

Later, I created an elective called the Contemporary American Novel, and spent the whole summer reading contemporary fiction in order to prepare to teach the course, and then had to repeat that each summer to stay current, which was a stroke of genius.

Then I went back to grad school while teaching, and then I got my current administrative job, and gradually I read less and less for pleasure, till a few years ago I realized that, although I was always reading, I rarely read for pleasure anymore.  So I made a goal to read for just thirty minutes every day.  For me, this was usually late at night, after everyone had gone to bed.

I read pretty fast.  If I am reading for pleasure, I can read a page a minute, so by my calculations, thirty minutes a day should have produced about 210 pages a week.  The first year I did this, I read 39 books, or about a book every week and a half.

Then I taught this new course I designed called Why Read? and I had a young woman in the class who had read 78 books for pleasure during the previous year.  That stoked my competitiveness, and so I set a goal for this past year to exceed her mark, which would require about a book and a half every week.

In the end, I read 95 books this past year.  That’s almost two a week.  Granted, some were Young Adult novels like Weasel or The Acorn People that were around 100 pages, but I also read DeLillo’s Underworld and Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weigh in at 827 and 773 pages, respectively.

In re-establishing my reading habits, I found it helpful not only to designate a specific time and place for reading, but to go back to my old practice of reading books in specific groupings.  So I read Cormac McCarthy’s first four novels and Toni Morrison’s last four, and I went on a Neil Gaiman kick for a while, then John Greene, then Junot Díaz, Andre Dubus, Khaled Hosseini, and Jeannette Walls. 

I read the last six winners of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the last four winners of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.  I read books I was embarrassed to have never read yet, like Night and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I filled in gaps, like Hawthorne’s children’s tales. 

Sometimes I broke it up with literary biography, like Rebel Souls, which is about Whitman, or The Life of a Prodigal, which is about Julian Hawthorne, and contemporary memoir like Vertigo, Blackout, and A Wolf at the Table.

I also began to make time for more professional reading, usually on Friday afternoons, right before I left work for home.  Again, just thirty minutes every Friday afternoon, and over the course of the year I was able to finish new books by Jeff Wilhelm, Tom Newkirk, Nancie Atwell, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Dana Goldstein, Dan Willingham, and Maja Wilson.

I’m motivated to point this out because when I survey my students, they all tell me how work and school work, social life, social media, quality TV, and other demands and distractions have drawn them away from pleasure reading—which to a one they all profess to have loved as younger children.

I don’t scoff at them.  I had been there too:  too busy to read and then too tired and then too enticed by TV and social media.  It took a conscious effort to break my new bad habits and re-establish good ones.  It’s worth having the conversation with our students, and modeling how.