So Much To Read
What I’ve Been Reading Lately
They tell us we are not reading much anymore, at least not in the longform. We turn to our phones and computers to read and listen to the latest news and commentary. Each of us is in the driver’s seat to select “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold once helpfully encouraged. I’m guilty. I start my day waking up in the constantly renewing information and misinformation from The Free Press, daily from The Plough Daily Dig, Substack,Poems Ancient and Modern, Christian Art, the digital NY Times and WSJ, and on and on. All of this in shortform, to which we are rapidly conforming.
They tell us also that this form of reading is actually changing the configurations of our brains. I can feel it happening. It shortens dramatically our attention spans. We simply are too impatient to read anything longer than 750 words, which is the average op-ed word count.
As a person who has lived with books at the center of my life, what am I doing? I am one of those whose worldview has been shaped, first by reading Scripture, then by reading good books and novels and books of poems. Am I going to give all of that up? I resist, for my own good, I have come to believe, for the good of our civilization, which I feel wholeheartedly must be preserved, though continually engaged and reshaped.
Reading substantive things, then, has become a cause for me. I know it’s not very popular, but that doesn’t matter to me. We’re guided way too much by polls, if no one is reading, then I won’t read either. I know too it’s become a little old fashioned. I know that AI is supposedly replacing the need to read good books. But not for me. I’m going to push against these assumptions.
What I read is not necessarily what you read. I get that, of course. But I continue to believe there are things that are central to our civilization. There are things that will clarify what is meaningful for our lives and our world. There are things we need to learn and know in order to ward off the awful acedia that seems to have settled over our lives like a fog. It comes in the form of both boredom and frenetic busyness. It comes in the form of loneliness and anxiety. Will reading cure all of these things. Well, no, but forever it has been the source of flourishing lives.
I’ve included a picture above of the books I have recently read, some of them reread. There are many more, which I may share in the days ahead. And, of course, these signal my reading interests. But they are good books, hefty books, challenging. They have given me new angles into the ways we are living through our time. They have given me insight into the faith by which I live and thrive. They have given me pause in some of the ways we are living life in the twenty-first century that aren’t so good for us. Look up some of these titles. You may be drawn to them too.
So those are my thoughts on reading for the day. I risk the thought that reading will not go away. Thoughtful writers, thankfully, will be with us forever. I want to continue to tap into the best of what is being thought and said. We’ve got some preservation work to do, the engine of culture and civilization. But remember, it’s work that comes with the gift of joyful living, books by your side on a warm summer evening. What could be better?