I mentioned in my 2025 digest that reading and literacy were going to be a priority for me this year. I’ve resolved this year to not be part of the apparent trend of declining reading and literacy rates, and instead to improve my reading. A motivator is that I want my sons to be readers, and parental role models (possibly, particularly that of fathers for boys) are major influences on the reading of children.

I’m not a bad reader, but there is definite room for improvement. I read with some interest and self-deprecating amusement this study that reports that literature students at two US universities were, for the most part, not excellent readers. The study shows excerpts from the text they had to read — Dickens’s Bleak House — and describes some of the comprehension errors and bad habits exhibited by the weaker readers. While I wasn’t as bad as some of the participants (I could at least pick up that the 40-foot megalosaurus on the streets of London was figurative), there were some errors where I had to hold up my hands and say “yep, that’s me”. Right in the first sentence, it mentions the “Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall”. Because I wouldn’t have looked up those words and guessed this was about a politician lounging in a bar, I’d have completely missed the setting — the Lord Chancellor is a judge, and Lincoln’s Inn Hall is a courthouse, and hence “sitting” also takes on a completely different meaning.

Possibly due to the proliferation of reading-related content and its role in profile-building (indeed, my own site lists a good chunk of the books I have read, a form of profile-building), I also sometimes fall into the trap of reading just to “get through” books. As Alan Jacobs says, however

one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care.

In other words, it is to read well, rather than be well-read.

So that’s the first reading goal. To resist the urge to read more or faster, but aim for comphension and reflection.

The next reading goal is in terms of what to actually read, which is in slight conflict with the first goal, as it involves trying to keep pace with an online “book club” on the Philosophy of Technology hosted by Jared Henderson, reading a book per month, around 50 pages a week. However, it is a subject that fascinates me, a few of the books on there I have already read and so will be a little easier to digest, and the number of pages isn’t huge (though it is high for me). This will be the main thing structuring my reading this year. Then again, I also won’t pressure myself too much. I’m at the time in my life where getting a moment’s peace and quiet to read is probably hardest (I have two young children). If I can’t keep up with every text, I’ll choose a subset to read at my own pace, following the advice of the first reading goal above.

Alongside this, I have three other texts I’d like to dive into this year, all Greek classics (more-or-less by coincidence). One is to finish my re-read of Plato’s Republic, which I ended up back-burnering during one of the slower sections but got back into recently. Then, as a relatively challenging fiction book to sink my teeth into, I’ll read the Odyssey. Finally, there’s Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which I have heard so much about and had a friend recommend to me recently. Again though, I’m not going to pressure myself! It’s not about “getting through” the texts. This is simply a proposed order to read the texts, rather than a challenge to squeeze them in.

What about you? I’d love to hear anything you hope to read this year.