This article was first conceived upon receiving
an email from a Thinking Friend in rural northwest Missouri--a man who lives
less than five miles from where I grew up. Even though he is now retired, Tom
wrote about the problem that many of us have, the problem of not being able to
read all that we want to read.
Reading
Problems
For most of us, the first reading problem is
simply that there is too much to read. In addition to all the books and
periodicals that beckoned for reading in past years, now we have the constant
inflow of stuff to read on the Internet, including the incessant flow of Tweets
and Facebook postings as well as “breaking news.”
So, the sheer volume of what we need to read
and want to read is definitely a problem.
There is also a quality problem: so much is
available on the Internet there is a tendency for more and more of us to
neglect reading books and journal articles that have been carefully researched
and written with the intention of being carefully read and digested.
Thus, we are faced with the problem of
having/taking the time to read substantial books/articles rather than just the
ubiquitous here today, gone tomorrow, writings.
Reading
Selectively
Through the years I have certainly experienced
the problem of having too much to read and too little time to read everything I
both needed to read and wanted to read. However, I have two suggestions in this
regard.
Particularly at the time when I was in the most
demanding job of my life--both in terms of time and responsibilities--I
purposely decided to spend the first thirty minutes of my workday every day
reading important books and reading them carefully and thoughtfully.
That wasn’t much, but it was something--and
something that added up to many significant books read each year. Of course, there
was a lot of other reading I did every day--work related reports, letters,
requests, etc., as well as academic articles.
Even in retirement I have continued the
practice of carefully reading meaningful books for at least thirty minutes
every morning. I have just finished Richard Rohr’s book The Universal Christ. (I am planning for my next blog article to be
about it.) And now I am reading Serene Jones’s new book Call It Grace.
The other suggestion is one that many of you
know and practice already: learn to read selectively. Everything doesn’t have
to be read in detail. Thus, there are some books that, of necessity, I read
only in part, and some I speed read--and it is all right to read some books
that way. (Of course, care must be taken not to misunderstand or jump to
conclusions.)
Reading
Well
Although I have only as yet read three of its twelve chapters, I highly recommend Karen Swallow Prior’s book On Reading Well: Find the Good Life through Great Books (2018)--and
I especially recommend the Introduction, subtitled “Read Well, Live Well.”
(I was first motivated to read Prior’s book
after reading the enticing article about it in the Plough; you can read that article and see the attention-grabbing
illustrations accompanying it by clicking on this link.)
Prior, an English professor, emphasizes, “Read
books you enjoy, develop your ability to enjoy challenging reading, read deeply
and slowly, and increase your enjoyment of a book by writing words of your own
in it” (p. 18).
Those words apply specifically to books such as
I referred to in my first suggestion above.
I close with the following words from Prior’s 2012
work, Booked (2012), p. 64.
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