You may note that I have cleared out the seldom-updated “Reading List” section on the sidebar of this blog. The reason? Here are the books I finished reading in 2013:
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel
- America’s Unwritten Constitution by Akhil Amar
That’s it — all three of them. I never even got to the books whose titles begin with B.
Seriously, this is pathetic. While there are several other books I started to read last year, the results speak for themselves.
I resolve to do better. Why is this important? First, I always learn something from reading, fiction or non-fiction. Books expose me to new ideas and different ways of thinking about the topics that interest me. Even if a book only serves to validate my currently-held points of view, the author’s formulation is usually more coherent than mine. Second, reading more books will peel my eyeballs away from the computer screen and perhaps reverse the decline in my attention span. Third, reading books of all types can only help improve my writing. Good books serve as examples of how to use words and organize ideas. Bad books, annoying as they are, have value as counterexamples.
So, my aim is to finish one book each month, for the rest of this year. This may seem like a modest goal to you, but it represents a four-fold improvement for me. I will count a book as “finished” if it turns out to be a bad book and I make a conscious decision to stop reading it. The clock starts now. I intend to finish “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman in the next two weeks. I will then turn my attention to “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri and go from there. You can follow my progress in the 2014 Reading List (see sidebar).
If any of you have must-read book suggestions, let me know. My non-fiction-to-fiction ratio has historically been about 20:1 but don’t let that stop you from mentioning a good novel.
