Reflecting on a Bad Reading Year

I have always been a voracious reader. Since I was a child hiding under bedsheets with flashlights, maxing out loans from my local library, reading The Hobbit back to back ten times in a row, devouring every book in the house (including my sister’s American Girl books, about which I now have strong opinions), I have always been almost constantly reading. Of course, these things ebb and flow. Some years I’ve read less, some years I’ve read more.

This past year, though, was a low point for me. The number isn’t important, these things are all relative. The fact is simply that I read about half as many books in 2025 as I read in 2024, and about half as many as I hope to read in 2026.

I could make excuses for this. 2025 was a difficult year. My family experienced several tragedies, losing my grandfather and my father in quick succession. As it happens, I can give much credit to my father for inspiring me to read. He was an avid reader himself, devouring the works of Tom Clancy and Lee Child and generally introducing me to the genre of what I would call “dad fiction.” No snobbery here, the stuff is great, and I appreciate him for passing on the love. He also introduced me to the Left Behind series, and while I can’t appreciate the theology of the books any longer, it was the first time an adult had let me read a series intended for adults, and I blazed through it as quickly as he would let me. Anyway, I imagine some of my falloff has been related to dealing with these losses.

I’ve also enjoyed a wonderful holiday season, traveling for Christmas to see my wife’s family and returning home to see mine. It’s generally considered rude to forsake fellowship for reading time, and so I often put my books down for the sake of familial conversation. No harm in that.

But grieving and traveling aren’t complete explanations for this past year’s sparse reading list. In the past I have managed to get through five or six books in a week at the beach, and have continued my reading schedule amidst many other losses. Something about this year was just different all around.

And, if you’ve been subscribed to me here on Substack for long, you may notice that this lack of reading has been accompanied by a lack of writing here. Typically these things go hand in hand. When I read a lot, I’m inspired to write a lot. When I decide to write something, I’m forced to read. When either declines, so it goes.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I’ve been very… politically distracted. As much as I would like to unplug from politics, inhabit the conceptual realm, contemplate the forms, and generally retreat from the burdens of practical life, I teach political science. That means that I have students who ask me questions about politics, and it’s my responsibility in some way to be able to either give them answers or at least point them to where they can get those answers. As much as it pains me, as a theorist by training and disposition, staying abreast of current political happenings is part of the job description, as it were. Staying abreast of current research trends in stuffy academic journals is part of it, too. This means that much of my reading, both in preparation for my teaching and in my free time, is in article form, not book form.

But I take no solace in this. I am not among those who console themselves with the global reading crisis by saying “people are still reading! It’s just in the form of short-form content!” Nonsense. If that’s reading, then a Pepsi and an Oreo is breakfast (to borrow a quip from Kurt Vonnegut).

In a recent conversation, Jared Henderson and Joseph Folley talked about the general, cultural decline in reading, and at various points both of them turned to gym analogies. Reading habits and attentiveness are, in many ways, trainable things, like muscles. You have to start small, work up, build tissue, and then move on to weightier things. If we press the analogy, this can even result in “beginner gains”; someone new to lifting might make relatively quick progress in weight, as someone new to serious reading might go from a relative non-reader to someone regularly reading classics in short order. I find myself in the unenviable position of having squandered my beginner gains and grown flabby in the interim.

The gym analogy is helpful, too, in the sense that it also gives us the principle that something is better than nothing (assuming that “something” is good form, not overloading, etc.). A little bit of exercise is better than none, and a bit of fun reading is better than none at getting you up and about and in the game again.

I do have fitness-related resolutions in this new year, but insofar as I have reading-related resolutions, they are these: Read often. Read for fun. Read more. Add weight. Repeat. I will do my best to write about the things I read here more often, as has always been the goal for this Substack. Thank you to both those who have stuck around and endured the drought and those who have newly arrived, and I hope to see you soon.