Experiments with Reading Goals

My Attempts to Break Out of A Reading Slump

I have always loved books. The crisp, tightly bound pages of newly printed novels or the aged smell of worn, well-loved tomes, especially filled with the thoughts of a previous reader. Their notes make me feel as though I’ve entered into a conversation with the person in the past whose interactions with the words on the page I am reading. I enjoy opening the cover and discovering new places. I love exploring those places with a character whom I am growing to deeply care for while becoming invested in their struggles.

My love of the written word extends beyond fiction. I love to read about other people’s lives and factual events and gain a glimpse into the world of the past through their stories. I enjoy learning new things from the comfort of my own home, skills that I can try to put into practice and facts through which my knowledge of how the world works is enriched. Through reading the viewpoints, thoughts and theories of others, I keep my mind open.

So why, if I love books this deeply, am I currently finding it such a struggle to read them?

My Reading Slump

I can’t see back to a time where I didn’t struggle with the occasional inability to consume books. Sporadically, I spend a week, maybe a month, devouring every book I pick up, but then, the struggle returns and I am unable to stick with any title that I choose, if I am able to choose one at all.

After a few weeks, I begin to feel disconnected to the world and to myself. The absence of books in my life creates a void and a frustration at the inability to fill that hole. Each time I attempt to begin a book in the middle of a reading slump, the reasons for being unable to commit shift and blur until I find it nearly impossible to identify any reason at all.

Sometimes, I get caught in decision paralysis, the inability to make a decision due to being presented too many options. Other times, I am distracted by things around me, or by nothing, and I cannot focus on the story. Sometimes I just can’t stay awake, or I hyper focus on the insecurities I feel over having become a slower reader in recent years.

An inner voice tells me there’s no point; I should stop trying.

But the thing is, I find books to be a deeply meaningful aspect of my life. They entertain me and provide me with an escape from the monotony of everyday life. I’m generally happier when I’m in a healthy relationship with my reading life.

Past Experiments in Reading Goals

I began setting goals for my reading life about a year ago, but the first few attempts failed. I set chose ahead of time, I could read more, but this only addressed one issue I faced. It also didn’t account for mood reading. Maybe shorter works would be a good starting point? It might have worked if I had aimed to read a short story a day or so, but no…

I decided to follow Ray Bradbury’s advice and read one short story, one essay, and one poem every day. While this could have been a good goal to pursue, such a rigid aim was not the way to find my way back to reading.

So then I tried the advice I found on this TEDx Talk, How Literature Can Change Your Life by Joseph Luzzi on YouTube. In this video, he talks about becoming a reader and lays out a list of 4 types of books to read to do so. This seemed like good advice, so I set a reading goal for the month to choose from these four specific niches.

• One book by one of my favorite authors
• One book by a contemporary author
• One nonfiction book
• One classic

This felt along the right track, with smaller reading goals, and fewer than endless choices. The books I put on the list were books I was excited to get to and it should have worked. I don’t know why it didn’t, but this system failed too.

This led me to *ahem* the best decision I could have made at this point. For some unknown reason, my otherwise intelligent mind decided if those didn’t work, then I should obviously combine the two. I’m not sure what I was thinking at this point, but guess what?

It didn’t work.

Discovering Audiobooks

Interspersed with these attempts, I learned that I like audiobooks. Well, I liked specific types of audiobooks anyway. I can’t seem to follow along or retain the story if the book I’m listening to is fiction. Long form creative fiction, like memoirs, get the same results.

What I can listen to are psychology or self help books or collections of essays. I don’t know what aspect of these genres enable me to absorb and focus on the material in its auditory form, but I devoured this format while I did household chores. They were the only reading I was doing.

For a while, I felt relieved the slump had ended. However, as time passed, I became disheartened, find that, though I enjoyed these books, they did not soothe the ache. I was still yearning to get lost in works of fiction.

From then until the end of April, my reading life consisted of audiobooks and the manga, Tomie, by Junji Ito. I had been working through Tomie for two months. I just never seemed to be able to get into the trance-like state that books used to pull me into.

My Current Experiment to Reset My Reading Life

Feeling a sense of loss, a type of mourning, at being separated from stories and their characters, I got angry. I wanted to read, so why didn’t I just do it?

I took a break and stepped back to really look at the causes behind the slump. Then I took a few days to reset. I spent time on myself. I journaled. A lot. I realized I had allowed myself to become distracted by other things, that they were taking up all of my available time. My phone was a problem. I would mindlessly lose hours of my time.

The amount of time I was spending on hobbies was excessive if I wanted to make reading a priority. There’s no need to cut things I enjoy out of my life, but I did need to balance the amount of time I devoted to activities with the importance of each of those choices. I began to feel like I could actually fix this; it only required reclaiming purposeful ownership of my time.

I began answering some questions: What did I want to use my time to pursue? Which things are important to me? Which things can take the back burner? What is it that I really want to accomplish? What activities bring me closer to these accomplishments?

I learned that reading and writing are among the five biggest priorities in my life, I set myself to the task of creating goals and putting some systems in place to help me hold myself accountable for the pursuit of these priorities. I may have taken some inspiration from others, this time I focused on what I already know about the way I work and what I want to learn about how I work.

Specific Things I’m Doing

Read First

When I have some free time to relax, I frequently find myself staring mindlessly at videos on my phone screen. If I have the time to watch a 60-90 minute true crime video, I have the time to read. I need to consciously choose to read over watching YouTube for at least 30 minutes a day. To help me in doing this, I try to move the book I’m reading room to room with me throughout the day.

Shorter Length Works

I have quite a few chunky books on my someday TBR list, but I’m struggling to get any reading done, so these are a bit overwhelming to look at and think about starting right now. So I’ve included several shorter novels on my TBR for May to read something that isn’t so daunting and rebuild my confidence. The shorter novels will give me a sense of accomplishment as I tick them off the list.

Add Variety

As I created my TBR for the month, I noticed that the genres I was going to include were very limited and it is important to me to keep some variety in the list, so I altered it a bit and saved a few of the horror/thriller books I want to read for June and added a few books from other genres.

Keep It Fluid

I have a tendency to set goals and hold onto them with a chokehold until the end of the goal term, even when they are not working. I need to stop this and allow myself to shift and alter, adding titles, subtracting titles, reframing, redoing, resetting as I need, not as is dictated by my past self. It is not giving up to reorganize things a bit.

Narrow Choices

I created a much shorter TBR for the month because I don’t want to have to pore through the many titles I’d someday like to get to in order to find the next read once I’ve finished a book. This should help me to minimize, if not avoid entirely, my proclivity to decision paralysis. I did, however, create the list far longer than what I figured I could possibly read in a month. I might be able to read that number of books in June or July when the kids are out of school for the summer, but in May, of a graduation year nonetheless, it will be impossible.

Why I Think This Will Work

I chose to go about building my list and creating my goals in such a vague way intentionally because I wanted to release myself from the expectations I have previously felt. The only expectation I am approaching my reading habit with this month is to read a book for 30 minutes a day. The time can be broken up into several smaller chunks if the day works better that way or all at once. It gives me some predetermined choices, though not too many, to reduce the amount of time I am wasting on trying to choose what to read next. Allowing the list to be fluid instead of expecting myself to read only what’s on the list caters to my being a bit of a mood reader.

AND I wanted to challenge myself. Making the list longer than I think I can achieve feels like a dare to me. I am, by nature, a bit on the rebellious side. The best way to get me to do anything is to forbid it or to underestimate my ability to do so. I think that challenging myself by making my goal too big will trigger this nature and therefore boost the number of books I read within the month in order to prove myself wrong.

So What Is On My TBR This Month?

My TBR for the month is just what sounded good to me at the time I created it. I will allow myself to read books other than what is listed if I come across a book that just calls to me or if one of my library holds becomes available, but this is the list of books that I’ve decided to work from for May.

Horror Picks

• Tomie by Junji Ito. I read Uzumaki by this author at the end of 2022 and I loved it. One of my daughters then bought me this book as a Christmas gift. As of editing this post, I have finally finished this book and if you like horror manga, I do recommend it.
• You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann. I saw previews for a movie based on this book starring Kevin Bacon and after watching the movie, I began the book after finishing the previous title. The movie was just okay, but, for me, the book turned out to be much better. All the things I didn’t like about the movie were original to the film. I thought this book made a great second choice because it is quite short at 113 pages.
• The House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt.
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. This is the third book I picked up. It is a reimagining of E.A. Poe’s The Fall of House Usher and loving both retellings and Poe’s work, I thought this would make a great choice to keep me excited for the next time I get to sit down to read.
• No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill. I picked this book up from the library because I had seen a review for Nevill’s book, The Ritual, but that book was already checked out, so I decided to browse the author’s other works.
• A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Malerman
• The Haunting of Ashburn House by Darcy Coates
• The Ghost Tree by Christina Henry
• Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell
• Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson
• The Power by Naomi Alderman. I chose this book because I saw that Amazon had made it into a series and I’m intrigued. I’d like to read the book first in this case because it may be a full year before I can get into watching a series. Television just isn’t that high on my list of priorities.
• The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton. This is the only chunkier book on my TBR. It does feel more attainable at this point than something bigger, like The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, though I would like to get to that one sometime soon too.

Nonfiction picks

• Voice First by Sonya Huber
• Improv for Writers by Jorjeana Marie
• 27 Essential Principles of Story by Daniel Joshua Rubin
• Digital Photography Masterclass by Tom Ang

If I counted right, that’s 16 books. I’ve read that many books in a month before, but I do not expect to hit them all. It is May 9th as I’m writing this post (May 12th as I’m editing) and I just started the third book yesterday, so my prediction at this point in time would be that I will end the month at between 6 & 8 books. Even if I don’t get that far, I’m hoping that these guidelines will work to get me out of my reading slumps so that I can get back to enjoying an avid reading life. I’ll let you know how it goes next month.

So how about you? Have you suffered a long clinging reading slump? How have you gotten yourself out of it?

Also, do you build TBR lists? Why or why not and how do you use them? How do you create them?