Reading resolutions

Reminders for self, to change up my way of reading going forward. At least for the next while.

Read more well-established works. Don’t just skid around and pick up books that only pique my interest in superficial ways (pretty covers, intriguing titles, cool synopses). Selecting books this way is fun and can open me up to new genres and styles, but then I also go through many, many unforgettable and bland works that leave no impact. I now have a craving for books that can somewhat guarantee an impression of some sort (good, bad, whatever) by the time I finish reading. And so I want to take on more classics, more acclaimed literary fiction, and more prominent nonfiction works that have served as articulate and pedantic investigations into real-life figures, phenomena, and time periods. This could potentially make me a snob, but at the end of the day I just desperately want to change up my book selection mechanism for a little while so I could gear myself to an alternative pool of books and experience reading differently.

Take ratings less seriously. Just like most things it’s convenient to have a rating system to evaluate the quality of a book, so readers can be informed of how worthy it is to start or even finish a book. But looking at ratings can be such a hindrance too. When I experimented with sharing some public opinions of the books I read on social media (and this blog), I also got used to the practice of dishing out scores for books (i.e., a combination of how much I enjoy reading them and how much I would recommend them to the people I know). Goodreads offered an interface that put too much emphasis on the 5-star rating, which also bothered me a lot because in most cases I didn’t agree with the community valuation of a book. Since switching to TheStoryGraph, I have lost the habit of giving books stars, which somehow has also changed my experience with reading. I no longer have this self-conscious feeling of wanting to reflect on how much I enjoy a book mid-way through it, or on how I can translate that enjoyment to a quantitative measure of some sort. Not caring about ratings allows me to not only disregard the opinions of a group of strangers who have largely different tastes than mine (something not particularly important to me right now), but also to engage with a book free from the anticipation to give my own judgment in numeric forms.

Reread. I have read so many good books in the past that it would be a shame to not revisit them. In the past I would be more motivated to reread books out of a simple craving for familiarity, but as I grow to realize the massive quantity of good books in the world, I also adapt to the idea that I need to constantly try new books because there are just SO MANY out there. But let’s be real, even if I could read hundreds of books a year I wouldn’t be touching even a fraction of all the books in existence (not to mention the floods of titles coming out every year). Besides, some of the ones I have read in the past still remain the best I have ever gone through, and I doubt new finds can likely replace all or even most of them. So I wish to re-explore some of my past reads, just to enjoy the familiar pleasure of reading a good, well-written book, or to potentially discover a new side of something about which I had previously assumed I knew everything.

Don’t make books the center of my world. These past two years I have read an insane number of books which I had never thought would even be possible. I’m happy to be able to afford all this time of leisure reading, but I also feel like it comes at the expense of other aspects in my life. Books have also been a big distraction from a LOT of my real-life responsibilities. I turn to books when I want to make progress but wish to dodge my actual commitments that seem more daunting and challenging than flipping pages and processing the texts on these pages. I lose out on opportunities and time to do many things I also wanted to do besides reading, simply because books are easier to handle, and I cannot go wrong with them. There’s still so much I wish to do and offer, and merely consuming volumes of texts drain all the time and brainpower I need to actualize other plans. So here’s to a new chapter (lol) where reading can take on a role of a side character to support the more monumental areas of my life which I want to dedicate more time to right now.

After a phase of trying out these new approaches to reading, I’ll see for how my relationship with books may change. What I care about isn’t so much the outcomes of reading. Books are immensely important to me, and all I want is to enjoy my experience with them without caring a lot about what I can gain after I close a book. It’s not about counting or tracking how much I read, nor even about the knowledge or insights I gain from reading something. For the next while, I only want to experience the delight of being immersed in a book without the pragmatic and mechanical concerns with constantly expanding my reading repertoire, with tracking and rating every single book, or with making sure I have something to say to the world about it.