The Joy of Reading

Just before the clock struck an end to 2021, I shared a few musings on New Year resolutions and a bit about my planner process that helps to keep me organized over the year. During our time in Florida, I had some more time to journal various goals, and managed to get a few of them written down in my planner. I’d already mentioned briefly my 2022 goal to have at least half of my Hear Our Stories interview series be fathers. Thank you to a few of you who have agreed!

Today I want to focus on one of my other 2022 goals: reading.

Book reviews
A few of you might recall my book reviews from 2021. I kicked things off with a three-part review series on Lotte Bailyn’s awesome, early-day feminist piece on new working norms. The other book I reviewed was Fair Play, another in the parental feminist genre (should that exist), though from a contemporary era. (here) I had meant to tackle a third book, Quiet Kids, but events overtook me in the last quarter of 2021.

As a result, I am super excited to report that I am now in the (borrowed) possession of Quiet Kids and that this is going to be my first book review of 2022!

Here’s a little background on why I chose it…

Quiet Kids is not a new book; it was published in 2014. But my interest was peaked about a year ago as I watched my son struggling in new social settings. I wondered how to help, given his reactions were unfamiliar to me. In fact there is this family fable that on my first day of preschool, my mother left me at the Methodist Church door and I bounded in without looking back. Little Clyde has never been like that. After two years at his same school he is only now participating in group singing but still refuses to dance. He’ll take his clothes off at home for Guns ’n Roses but get him in a social setting and he clamps right up.

Apparently my husband was the same. His parents claim his timidness made him a target for bullying in elementary and junior high. In high school, his parents finally moved him to a new school when things got really bad. So when my husband sees little Clyde being shy or timid, his reaction is to force him to work through it. My interpretation of this is that it is a visceral reaction to his own childhood, and self. Needless to say, the forcing hasn’t helped much.

So when I read a short book review of Quiet Kids, I thought it was worth a read. Stay tuned!

Personal reading
The other reading goal I have for this year is to make my way in chronological order through two murder mystery series. The first is a household classic these days for so many people: Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. For the Canadians reading this, it is set in the Eastern Townships outside Montreal. Although I have read the entire series, I didn’t do it chronologically, despite many people recommending I do. In retrospect, they were right. The other series I’m going to tackle is a new one for me written by Laurie King, recommended by an avid reader in our neighborhood. The Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series, as it is referred to, imagines what it would have been like had Sherlock Holmes had a female sleuthing protege, a 14-year old named Mary Russell.

How to read your way through 2022
Goals are good. But it’s important to be reasonable to avoid disappointment, and reading requires time, something that most of us working parents don’t have a lot of. Combined, Penny and King’s series bring the total amount of books I intend to read this year to a whopping 24, equally split between the two. Then we add in book reviews for my newsletter and we may well reach 28.

I was just starting to nervously wonder how I was going to tackle my reading projects when, in perfect timing, I stumbled on a great article by Pilita Clark. She writes in the Financial Times every Monday, normally on business life. Last week she was uncovering the secrets of how high-powered executives and entrepreneurs get through copious amounts of books each year.

It is a playful article and here I share with you the reading secrets she picked up in interviews with high-performing individuals:

Rise early: if you want inspiration look no further than Dan Blank, author and creative coach (hi Dan!). Every day his IG story starts with a 4:21am timestamp of the book page he is on. His clock may be radically set compared to the majority of us but Pilita Clark does remark that most people she interviewed rise before 5:30 to get in some good old fashioned reading before their day begins.

Be ruthless: if a book is not doing it for you, simply put it back on the shelf. I couldn’t agree more.

Read anywhere: she claims people read and walk their dog which seems slightly unsafe to me. But anything else goes: bed, couch, bus, cafe, bar, etc…

Skim non-fiction: read the introduction, conclusion and a few pages of each chapter work, claims one prominent author.

Read books simultaneously: my husband is guilty of this. If I were to opine, this strategy is not very productive for him. But others who Pilita interviewed report it keeps their interests peaked.

Read diversely: a few years ago I got stuck on mystery and crime series, and haven’t really veered away too much. Perhaps that is why this year for my birthday and Christmas I received a range of books from family, and I couldn’t be happier with their diversity: a biography of the artist Barbara Hepworth, a stunning Barbara Kingsolver novel, a biography on Truman Capote’s muses, a short story collection of Ann Patchett, and an author I did not even know of, Louise Eldrich. 2022 here I come!

Disconnect devices when you read: this one is going to be very helpful, I can tell already.

Stay committed: here I will quote directly from Pilita as it tickled me, “Netflix is possible but not on the scale you are used to.”

Role modeling good reading habits now
I’ll end with this thought to tie it back into parenting. Almost every week, my husband cites to me his memory of discovering a love for reading which started as a young child. His parents were both big readers and every night after dinner they retired to the family room to read. He associates this family act as what got him hooked. I too grew up in a home where books trumped TV on any given day.

Today we are trying (not always successfully) to emulate this with little Clyde. As I wrote back in The Little A to Z, there is no wrong time to start reading to your children. As they get older, and they learn to read themselves, there is even more urgency to keep the habit up. By modeling our own love for reading, it will go a long way in positively influencing the joy of reading for our little ones.

Do you have any reading in mind for 2022? Any books you want me to review?