How to keep reading

If only feeling bad about not reading enough was conducive to reading more. Unfortunately, we live in a world that explicitly or implicitly undermines the act of reading for fun, and it’s incredibly easy to fall into that complacency. If you’d like to make reading an active and important part of your life, you’ve made a great choice and I hope this article will be helpful! 

It seems counterintuitive to foster the habit of reading for joy by occasionally reading books that don’t bring you joy: maybe they’re boring, difficult, or unlikable for some other reason. But embracing such aversion can be useful at times to broaden the scope of your interactions with literature as well as learn about yourself in a way: sure, you hated this book, but why? e.g. why might you have a harder time connecting with character-driven works than plot-driven works, especially if you notice this preference becomes a pattern? Why doesn’t this style of writing work for you? All of this helps shape yourself as someone who actively engages with literature through analysis and potentially self-discovery. 

To this end, I believe that reading goals can end up being counterproductive by emphasising the destination as opposed to the process. Having set ambitious goals to read X books in Y months, I often found myself technically successful in managing to flip through said books from first page to last page, but unable to meaningfully remember all of them because I’d diluted their value to the number on my Goodreads account. While reading goals can hold you accountable, decreasing the number or writing short reflections can encourage you to spend longer with each book, purposefully engaging with their respective worlds and messages instead of speeding through chapters just to say you did. 

I’ve kind of unintentionally ordered these ideas from least to most controversial here, so I’m going to now propose that there is so much value in memorisation. I never appreciated this as a kid forced to recite poetry I didn’t care for, but think about what goes into the memorisation process: much to my younger self’s chagrin but now to my delight, there are no shortcuts; you’re forced to sit with the poem and read it again & again & again, discovering new throughlines and turns of phrase that you never would have without the mindset shift of paying attention to every single word with no exceptions. When I first started memorising poems of my own volition, I did not expect it to be fun, but being able to get the poem’s grist beneath your nails and actively work alongside it is actively thrilling. 

Besides, there is magic in the fact that once you memorise a poem or a paragraph of prose, you can read it anytime. Wherever you go, it goes with you, sloshing around inside your mind. During subway rides, rollercoaster queues, even dentist appointments, I’ve cracked open my mental copy of ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg (just the first 20 lines right now, though it’s my dream to one day have it all down by heart) and had those words keep me company. It’s true that it’s not for everyone, but I was adamant it wasn’t for me until I tried it.

Further steps if you’re interested in The Literary Canon™ 

Hello aspiring English majors and birds of similar feathers. We’re gonna make almost no money and have a blast doing it. 

The canon is a collection of works whose reputations are running laps around themselves. It also feels endless. And if the concept of an endless, slightly daunting, variably challenging reading list delights you, great! A huge part of enjoying ‘the classics’ is not viewing them as an obligation like the education system might imply, but as an opportunity to interact with something millions of people across time have esteemed not just good but important. Any feelings of despair should only be attached to the fact that one will never have enough time to read them all.

Especially if you’re thinking about studying English literature at university, a broad knowledge of the canon from Old English to the modern day is invariably helpful, necessary even, but with limited time it’s important to be strategic. After you read a ‘classic’, identify elements you enjoyed: the structure? the prose style? the themes? and keep branching off to similar classics from there until you’ve found a specific element of literature that you’re obsessed with and willing to delve into beyond the major figurehead works. This element can be thematic (e.g. consciousness, hedonism) or era-specific (e.g. postmodernism, early modern literature). Especially with the latter, it can be helpful to know a bit of literary theory (i.e. the analytical lenses adopted in the academic study of literature) as well as the historical context of the time period: for example, what was it about the post-WW1 world that encouraged such surrealism in the modernist movement? With university applications in mind, having a niche that you comparatively know a lot more about is going to set you apart from the people who have cursorily read the major works from the major eras without demonstrating deeper understanding of any.

Reading literature is a way to expose yourself to and interact with countless attempts to capture the human condition and rationalise the awful beautiful incomprehensible world around us. It’s also plainly quite fun. Good luck out there.