"Raison de lire"

Meditations of a once and future bookworm

For someone who wallows in his own words like the proverbial pig in slop, I’ve had a recent Come to Jesus with myself for not reading as much as I used to.

As I understand it, mine is not an isolated problem. My socials (skewed as they are towards folks navigating their ADHD) percolate with people bemoaning a noticeable decline in their annual reading intake (and a correlated/causal decline in their tattered attention span that allows them to read anything of length) on the various socials, which is both believable and predictably ironic.

My takeaway: it’s not that we’re reading less, per se, it’s that we’re reading other things than books.

I’m as guilty of this shift in behavior as anyone else. I have many happy memories of sunnier, gauzier days when always had my nose in a book. As a school kid who read way above his grade level, I devoured my school libraries, looking for higher highs of more and more sophisticated prose. When I was dragged to my kid brother’s baseball games, while other kids my age ran around in circles and repeatedly failed to connect a ball with a bat or a glove (mostly, charitably, because they were seven years old), grown-ass adults hollered and screamed about this sorry situation at their kids and to each other as if any of it actually mattered. I knew from the outset, as did Mom, that none of this nonsense was for me, and I always brought a book (or two) along to bury my nose in and let the insanity pass me by. Fast forward fifteen years or so, and reading a book was still the thing to do, now on the subway, to ignore other people and the slow passage of time spent getting from point A to point B. Fun story: for about a year in my early 20’s, I had an especially hideous commute to my fabled 9-5: a bus to the subway to a bus to a boat. Go ahead and say that out loud without laughing, I dare you. Queens to Manhattan, Manhattan to Jersey. JERSEY! Two Boroughs and another state for crying out loud. The point is, I got a LOT of reading done in those days, as there was a lot to be wisely ignored in the world around me.

And then the phones came. And then The Facebook came. And I trust you know the rest.

Aside from the scrolling social feeds and the addiction that came with them and the definite erosion of whatever barriers stood between my brain and its nascent ADHD tendencies, there also came an addiction to news. Not that there hasn’t been quite a bit to learn about and discuss in world affairs in the last twenty years but Staying Informed slowly and surely and steadily became a part-time job for a lot of us. Multiple newspapers and magazines and blogs entered my consciousness via my eyeballs every day, often spurred by posts on social media. A game of ping-pong ensued: social media link to article, back to social media to a different think piece, back and forth, back and forth, with occasional stops in E-mail Land and checking the Times for whatever I might find interesting. All day. Every day. In-between and sometimes on top of the rest of my actual life.

This new media diet stood in stark opposition to my original raison de lire (ignoring loud, vexatious, stupid adults) and instead rewired my brain to be OBSESSED with loud, vexatious, stupid adults.

And now I’m tired. Tired of grown-ass adults screaming about a whole lot of nothing. I suspect you may be, too. So, I’m burying my head - not in the sand, but in a book, or, rather, a bunch of books. I’m committing myself to retraining my mind to carry larger thoughts and extended arguments again - beyond the thoughts and arguments that I try to pour into my work.

For those interested, here are the books I finished this year (with affiliate links):

1. When - Daniel H. Pink

2. Be Our Guest - Theodore B. Kinni

3. Unreasonable Hospitality - Will Guidara

4. Spritz - Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseau

5. Batman: Year One - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

6. The Ritual Effect - Michael Norton

7. The Writer’s Journey - Christopher Vogler

8. Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds - Margaret Kerrison

9. Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences - Curtis Hickman

10. Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto - Abraham Burickson

Verdict: Mucho meh. Less than one per month. This situation can be improved.

But here’s my proposed list for 2025, a wide-ranging, eclectic group of titles that have piqued my interest in the past year:

FICTION

1. Babbit - Sinclair Lewis

2. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

3. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

4. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

5. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry - Fredrick Backman

6. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

7. Four Freedoms - John Crowley

8. The Mythmakers - John Hendrix

9. Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, Vol. 1 - Rupert Holmes

NONFICTION

1. Dead Wake - Erik Larson

2. The Haunting of Alma Fielding - Kate Summerscale

3. The Tools - Phil Stutz & Barry Michels

4. Digital Minimalism - Cal NewPort

5. Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman

6. Meditations for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman

7. Hope for Cynics - Jamil Zaki

8. On Tyranny - Timothy Snyder

9. Dickens and Prince - Nick Hornby

10. Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off-Broadway - John Devore

And finally, I plan to finish two titles that I keep picking up, but never following through to the end:

1. Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull

2. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

This ought to keep me, and my mind, occupied and expanding, even as our culture undergoes… whatever this is that it’s undergoing.

What’s on your book list for the new year?