A short history of my reading life & how to set reading goals.

“Every great library begins in the heart of someone with at least three heroic loves: a love for words, a love for truth, and a love for future generations.”

-George Grant in Shelf Life

I remember all my early elementary years were spent carrying around stacks of books. Nancy Drew, Grimm’s Fairytales, anything about Bigfoot or the Titanic, Nesbit’s Shakespeare, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Pinocchio, Narnia. (I like to think I had somewhat varied tastes even for a child.) It’s a rare memory for me to have had a single book in my hands. It’s always been stacks. I’d drape myself over a couch and spend the afternoon reading from one chapter of each book at a time, working my way through the stack. Then I’d start over again from the first book in the stack. Day after day, year after year. Brian and I never even stayed out late dating in high school because I wanted to be home for the books and my bed. And he needed to be home to sleep and work (the man has worked multiple jobs since the day I met him).

I’m still pretty much the same exact sort of reader today, except I’d like to think I’ve diversified the content a bit more. I’m much busier now, so my reading life consists not of chapters a day, but a few pages a day from the same stack of books every single morning (2 pages, to be exact). Then I wake up the next day and start the stack all over. If I don’t have any afternoon projects to work on during nap, then I have a few books I rotate for my afternoons. I am so spent come 8 P.M. that all my brain has the energy to follow is narrative, so there’s no real stack at night. I’ve really been enjoying loooooong novels the last six months or so. I finished Lonesome Dove a few months ago, Gone with the Wind last week, reading Lés Mis right now, and East of Eden will be next.

I spent my very early 20’s reading Edith Schaeffer, Elisabeth Elliot (I remember the day I discovered her lectures as a 19 year old because I felt extremely hurt that people had let me spend my teen years reading Nicholas Sparks when EE would obviously have been better content for me spiritually), and anything devotional and for women from Crossway. I’m sort of not kidding on that last part, as one of my big roles at DR magazine was reviewing books. As you can see, there wasn’t much diversity in my diet. I had fairly efficient reading purposes: be a better woman, wife, and mother. Long gone were the days of reading fiction for me (This is another post for another time, but a very bookish friend and I were chatting recently and I made the connection that I read sooooo much fiction so fast in college that I needed a change of pace after school. It was the same for her, but flip flopped with non-fiction). I actually took a bit of pride in it. It would still be a few years before I would grapple with the moral failings of my reading life and repent and pick up the Ransom Trilogy.

Everything changed when I found The Circe Institute and The Scholé Sisters. I binged all the resources these two groups had to offer for a few years and realized that even though my degree was in English, basically everything I had learned was either extremely intro level understanding or entirely wrong and had been tainted by Feminist Theory. As a matter of fact, I was so entrenched in literary criticism in college that my Crit Lit professor begged me to come back and teach with him. Praise the Lord I turned down the job on the spot because that was the very day my ten week old little boy full on belly laughed for the first time and I never wanted to miss a second of his childhood if I could help it, but I’m simply trying to say that I never really challenged much of what I learned in college. I excelled there academically. And yet, I was impoverished in my true understanding of the world and what it means to be human. Even more importantly, I was just two short years away from homeschooling at this point. How in the world was I going to hand on an education that I myself hadn’t been given?

The rest of what I’m going to say isn’t prescriptive, but it is meant to challenge you to bite off more than you can chew. That’s sort of how I role with most thing, for better or for worse, but I do think it’s important for the average woman today to challenge herself intellectually far more than she’s naturally inclined to.

One of the areas I knew my little boys would appreciate me learning more about was science. At this point I probably still had zero clue about the way classical folks break up the different branches of science, but I just knew I wanted a living science book, written by an expert in the subject who was so passionate about their topic that they could get me excited as well. Bonus points were for finding someone who used a lot of literary forms in their writing (after all, my emphasis in school was in poetry). Enter Annie Dillard.

The torrent of grief and obsessive desires to find-out-everything-I-could-know-about-anything-and-everything quickly followed my reading of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The cool thing was not only that I learned a ton of new information about nature from this beautiful book, but I also learned more about how generous our Lord is, and I shed a lot of false beliefs I held about the world from my vegan days. I also got The Handbook of Nature Study and began to reference it regularly when the boys asked questions or I wanted to know about an animal or flower we happened upon on our hikes.

The next thing I did was buy the entire Ambleside Online Year 10 book list for myself. I’m still making my way through these books, and likely will for the rest of my life (that’s just how good and meaty AO is!), but the books my husband and I have completed from this list are still some of our all time favorites. History of the American People, for example.

I really don’t want to overlook the fact that at the same time I started reading more widely, I also increased the rate at which I read through scripture. I started a solid habit of daily Scripture reading as a senior in college, but I went at a fairly slow pace. I started The Bible Reading Challenge around the same I undertook recovering my own humanizing education and I really think it helped me quickly solidify a Christian worldview, especially as I grew in my understand of God’s law and it’s application today. I don’t know if I could have gained the same sort of cohesive worldview had Scripture not had been my first meal of the day. Because I was reading more Scripture in a day, I was noticing more themes throughout the whole Bible, and able to quickly see those same things in my own observations of the world, reality, as well as what all the ancients and Great Conversationalists throughout history wrote in their words.

My great reading plan of 2019 was to take Pastor Wilson's canon and Andrew Kern’s canon (I honestly can’t remember where I found his list?) and just slowly work my way through those books. That was the year I finally dove into the ancients and picked up Shakespeare again, even though I honestly didn’t want to do either. I’m happy to report I’m a lover of Herotodus’ Histories, what I read in The Iliad is still some of the most solid, helpful narratives that I’ve gone back to time and again to encourage my spiritual formation as a woman, and Boethius forever changed my view of the heavens in his book on music and the spheres. (I plan to publish these lists for subscribers that I compiled from the advice of these men at some point in the future.)

It was around my fourth child that the idea of sticking to a reading list felt like too much for me, but I still wanted to challenge myself and read subjects I hadn’t approached yet. For me, that meant setting a general goal of “in 2020 I want to read more about gardening and homesteading” (This was a pre COVID goal, too, which turned out to be quite timely). Since 2020, that’s sort of been my MO. In 2021 it was architecture and design, 2022 was more classics, and 2023 was more poetry (which admittedly, started strong by completing Evangeline right out of the gate, but fizzled out quickly). I am obviously changing things a bit now with my 40 before 40 list, but I’m feeling much more confident in the width of curriculum I’ve set for myself (although I neeeeeed to get back into some daily poetry reading).

All that to be said, I think the most actionable way to read more is to either make an actual list of books or pick a theme. “Read more in 2024” isn’t actionable enough. You need some physical books in your hand. Also, important side note: reading more isn’t the same thing as reading better. I probably read less books this year than I did in 2016 and before, but the quality just keeps getting better and better.

Enjoy the Christmas book haul.

.

xoxo