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Trying to develop a new reading habit

Dec 21, 2024

Elderly man reading a book with piles of books in the background

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

I've been a member of a book club for a couple of years now. We meet about once a month and we rotate hosting. The hosts provide dinner and we typically bring a bottle of wine. There are usually about 8 to 10 of us in attendance and it's a really great time of socializing and discussing the book we've read.

Anyway, I have vascillated between listening to and reading the paper book. It varies. If I start listening and I don't care for the narrator, I'll buy the book and continue from there.

My big problem in this whole thing is that I tend to procrastinate when it comes to reading the book. I'll sometimes start it just a week before and have been known to finish listening or reading the book on the day of the meeting.

There are upsides and downsides to this. One upside, which I'm not convinced holds, is that the content is relatively fresh in my mind. The downside is that I get increasingly anxious the closer to the meeting date. If I'm listening to the book, I'll speed it up to 1.3x or 1.5x so that I can be sure to finish it.

On a couple of occasions over the past year or so, I have read the book early. I have found that in these instances, I have had more time to consider the story and develop more insights into the story and the characters. It has helped me to be more thoughtfully engaged in the discussion.

So, I'm trying something new. My typical morning routine, post shower, is to eat breakfast, make a cup of cofee, and then head over to my computer to check email, catch up on news, and peruse social media sites.

Starting yesterday, I've made a change. Once I've made my coffee, I head to the family room, sit down, and read 50 pages of the book for the next meeting.

So far so good. I'm hoping to stick with this, especially as I have a friend on the east coast who has suggested that we start reading Robert Caro's 4 volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I've asked my wife for volume 1 for Christmas.

I think that I'm going to need this new habit to both keep up on the book club books and to tackle the LBJ biography series.

On a web-related note, I also plan to start a "bookshelf" section for this site, similar to these: