How to Read More

So you want to read more? Great! Here’s how you do that:

Ready?

Here we go.

Don’t miss this.

If you want to read more…read more.

That’s it.

That’s the post.

Okay. I might have a little more. I hear people tell me fairly frequently that they’d like to read more, or they wish they had time to read more, or they don’t know how I read as much as I do, etc. Some of this is that most people who know me know that I read a good bit, that I value it a lot, and I’m in a general culture at school and church that value reading - so people often seem to be expressing a sort of guilt that they don’t prioritize reading. I do kind of think reading is a great use of time for a lot of reasons, and people probably should prioritize it more, but a fair number of these folks probably don’t ACTUALLY want to read more - they just feel like they should want to. That’s not an issue I can fix. I also don’t read as much as I usually want to, but the truth is that we all make choices as to how to spend our time. If people really want to read more, they will make the choices to be able to do so.

That said, reading more isn’t necessarily the greatest good there is, and there may easily be times or seasons in our lives where it is appropriate to make choices that are NOT reading. But we should acknowledge that is what we are doing, and not pretend that people who do read more have accessed some kind of superpower or secret knowledge to be able to do so. They have different lives or have made different choices, for better or for worse. So if you want to read more and you are not doing so because you have made different choices for your free time, then it’s your choices that are keeping you from reading. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The immediate impetus for thinking about this was an article I read a few weeks ago by a guy who reads 100 pages a day. Every day. No matter what else is happening. He presented this as his own self-discipline surrounding reading, not as a prescriptive thing others should do, but it’s hard to escape this feeling like a bit of a judgment on those of us who apparently aren’t disciplined enough to read 100 pages a day. I always start articles like this excited, hoping to find some new time management techniques or again, that secret knowledge to read more - even though by now I should know better.

Here are a few of his suggestions. Get up early and read before other people get up. Check. I’m up at 5am every day to get in my devotions and a few minutes of reading before getting everyone ready for school; but I suppose I could get up even earlier. Take a book everywhere so you can take advantage of waiting time. Check. I’ve done this for years; ask anyone I know if they’ve literally ever seen me anywhere without a book. Use lunchtimes and breaktimes to read. Now, I have done this a lot in the past. I read a ton of books at lunch when I worked at a bank - I still remember most of them and associate them with that time! In my current job, I eat lunch along with all my teacher colleagues and I prefer their company and conversation to reading alone - having great conversations with them was one of the major reasons I wanted to join this faculty. Avoid social media. Amen, brother. Read in the evening after the kids go to bed. I do this as well…when I can stay awake (remember I got up at 5am) and when my husband is doing something that I’m not part of - this evening time is one of our few chances to really connect, and I’m not going to read rather than talk with him or share a movie/tv show we’re both interested in. (Sometimes I try to read and watch at the same time, with varied results.)

If you really do want to read more and you’re struggling for time, these are pretty solid suggestions - but if you already do these things or are intentionally making different choices because other things are more important to you than reading, then you may be reading to your current capacity in this season of your life.

You can see that each of these suggestions requires making a choice - getting up early rather than sleeping, reading at lunch rather than conversing, reading in the evening rather than sleeping or talking with your spouse. At first I wondered if this guy was married and had kids - he does, and I’ll give him props that it really doesn’t sound like he’s reading when he should be interacting with his family. And he definitely works a full-time job, so he’s not taking time away from that to read. So maybe it is that I’m undisciplined.

Or maybe there’s some gender stuff mixed in here. It sounds like he does participate quite a bit in taking care of his young children. But is he spending an hour or more making dinner, the way I do most evenings? Is he helping with homework in the afternoons (he’s probably working his job)? Is he driving kids to afterschool activities? I do get a fair bit of reading done DURING afterschool activities, sometimes, if I’m not trying to keep my younger entertained during my older’s activities. Is he washing clothes and making sure the kids have uniforms for the next day? Maybe this isn’t fair, and I don’t want to get into the whole “women do way more than men at home” discourse, because truth be told, it’s not unusual for me to get home from school at 3:15 and let the kids watch a show, easily leaving time for me to read…and I often promptly fall asleep when I try this. I’m not sure what the secret is for this! He doesn’t address getting sleepy while reading in the afternoons/evenings; perhaps this is a personal failing of mine.

Primarily, I think this is a situation of priorities. Reading is a priority for me, but not always the top one. One of his anecdotes was of him walking with a friend and the friend noticing him engrossed in a book. I’m sorry, why bother walking with a friend if you’re going to read the whole time? You don’t have to capture every single second to increase your reading time. This is turning reading in a productivity task. But if you’re going to read 100 pages every day, these might be the kind of choices you have to make.

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As an experiment I have tracked my reading for a few weeks, and I was reading quite a bit during the time I tracked. I generally managed 25-45 pages a day. (For a counterpoint, I read about 150 pages per day pretty consistently during Christmas break, when I had no time taken up by school hours, prep, or grading. Having two-ish hours to read before my kids got up instead of 30 minutes was the biggest factor. Also, this is not even considering time to annotate, contemplate, commonplace, or otherwise consider books as or after reading them, which I’m focusing on a little more these days.

Could I manage 100 pages a day during school? I think perhaps, if a few things were true - if I didn’t spend lunch enjoying the conversation of my fellow teachers, if I didn’t respond to my children’s interruptions, if I didn’t spend time bonding with my husband over TV in the evenings, if I didn’t spend an hour cooking dinner most evenings, and if I somehow managed not to fall asleep.

But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t give up everything for reading. I love reading, I think it’s important, I wish I could do more of it, and yet there are some things that I will choose over it, and those are the correct choices to make. I do think that a lot of times when people say “oh, I don’t have time to read” they probably really do, if they made different choices about how to spend their time. But there’s no secret formula here. You can make time for reading, and if it’s important to you, you will. But it may not be as much time as you want, and that may be okay.

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