The Ballad of Reading Goals

(...sorry. anyway this is about how I read and what unexpectedly helped me exit the Slough of Reading Aspiration)

The mulberries are overripe, the chicory has put forth luminous purple blossoms, the night is full of fireflies and heat lightning—it’s summer! Time for Summer Books issues; time for “summer reading.” (Or, if you are in the southern hemisphere, uh… time to curl up with a book by the fire!) So here is how I organize my own reading, and how that structure helps me meet certain goals some of you all may share. This post looks long but a good chunk of it is just a list.

I’ve written before about how I decided to start organizing my daily rosary so that it followed the events, people, etc which have been important in my life. I divide things up by weeks: one week for my ancestors, one week for my family, one week for my hometown, and so on, eventually moving in a roughly-chronological progress through my life and starting over when I reach the end. Each “theme” gets one decade of the day’s rosary, as I pray for anyone important to me during that time of my life, anyone I harmed, or whatever makes the most sense given the theme; I have a couple different mysteries I’ll hook the themes to, basically depending on whether the people I’m praying for are alive or dead. There are other aspects of this practice which are relevant to my spiritual life but not to my reading.

I quickly discovered how much fun it is to link these weekly themes to whatever I’m reading, the movies I watch, the music I listen to and so on. It’s let me revisit so many things I’ve loved in the past and see them with new eyes. It’s shown me unexplored aspects of times and places I thought I knew. Instead of reading more broadly, I end up reading more deeply: returning to things I already think help “make me me,” and finding new perspectives on them.

And this reading structure has made it much easier to do a couple things that I’d vaguely wanted to do for a while, and which I think many other people also want. For a long time I’d wanted to do more re-reading—when you read things only once you miss so much light and shadow!—and this reading structure makes it easy: I re-read something that was important to me during the period I’m giving to God and Mary in prayer. It’s also, more to my surprise, made it easy to read more books by people of color.

The reading schedule removes a lot of choice paralysis. I’ve seen a fair number of people say that they want to read more books by, say, women of color. But that goal is so broad that it just leaves them unsure where to begin. The reading schedule is one way to clear away the cloud cover. You’re no longer looking for just any book by a woman of color; you’re looking for books about the communities of your hometown, or for gay classics, or for works of Christian mysticism. You can re-read the books you think you missed the point of in high school, or seek out the books you wish your high school had assigned.

Part of the fun of the project is finding ways to squeeze things I want to read anyway into a theme. I keep a couple different book lists, and as I approach the start of a new reading cycle I’ll go through and figure out which titles fit the upcoming themes. I go from vaguely “wanting to read things” to knowing that I’ll likely read them in three weeks, or three months.

An unexpected, really helpful feature of this structure is that difficult themes give way regularly to pure-pleasure themes. And there’s usually a way to get a more relaxing book even into weeks with very painful themes (maybe a pulp novel touching on the theme instead of, like, a 500-page history with dates in the subtitle), though harder-edged books also sneak into weeks I expected to be light, as when I picked up The Year of Dangerous Days during a disco-era week where I usually revisit beloved children’s books.

Some technical notes: I’m usually reading two books at once, 40pp/day of each, generally one “easy” book and one “hard” book. I drop down to 20pp/day of a book when that seems advisable. The point is not to stress out about this stuff, but the daily page-count goal definitely helps me unstick myself from the Slough of Social Media. (Is not this life simply a series of sloughs?) Books overspill and “underspill” their theme weeks. This week I’m reading Fadhil al-Azzawi’s Cell Block Five: An Iraqi Novel and Phil Klay’s Missionaries (if you guess that we’ve reached the early 2000s you’re not wrong…). I’ll finish the al-Azzawi early, so I’ll start Alyssa Cole’s When No One Is Watching, whereas the Klay will spill at least into next week. I leave a blank space after finishing a book so I can catch up if I need to. The whole cycle takes me about 40 weeks; big chunks of time are covered in one week and then like 1996 gets three weeks to itself.

You can obviously massage this to fit your own reading speed, free time or lack of it, and so on—there’s no reason the themes have to be weekly instead of monthly, for example. You could just make a list of themes for your prayer and switch to a new one when you finish your book, or when the liturgical season changes, or whatever.

As you’ll see below, I also sometimes make food associated with the theme. There’s essentially an endless array of variations here. You could absolutely find saints associated with the theme, and write prayers to them or do any traditions associated with them.

There are two weeks, at about the 2/3 point of the schedule, where I only read fanfiction. So yes, this schedule is how I read Kyle Harper’s big Roman slavery book, and how I finally read Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth after owning it for more than a decade. But it’s also how I got to revisit pogrebin’s creepy Harry Potter fic. Heart emoji, quill emoji, I am reading another book emoji!

Here’s a list giving you a rough idea of the kind of thing the cycle might include:

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African-American Literary Imagination

The Third Reich of Dreams is available with an account at the Internet Archive (archive.org)

https://archive.org/stream/3rdreichofdreams/Charlotte%20Beradt%20-%20The%20Third%20Reich%20of%20Dreams_djvu.txt maybe doesn’t need account??

http://www.yiddishpennysongs.com/

The Last Fair Deal Going Down

on Kanopy: Personal Problems, Let the Fire Burn

Slickee Boys, The Enzymes

The Soho Press Book of ’80s Short Fiction

The Pushcart War

The Skull in the Snow

https://if50.substack.com/p/1977-zork

THE GOLDEN GIRLS (1985)—this is on Hulu

On Kanopy, a 1989 St Francis biopic “Francesco,” w/Mickey Rourke as Francis and Helena Bonham-Carter as St. Clare. I am not making that up.

lol Star Trek tie-in novels; Unspoken Truth is about Saavik & the long shadow of Hellguard, and is by the same person as Dwellers [in the Crucible].

re-read Les Mis

Divine Horsemen; Tell My Horse

Ayiti Mon Amour is on Kanopy as of 4/4/21

Haitian soup joumou

Sappho

*ethereal voice* The Siiimmpsooooonnnnnssss *doo doo doo do doo doo do dah doo do do do*

The Noir Style

Falsettoland

lol Neuromancer

Sula

The Buddha of Suburbia

marc almond e.g. Blond Boy

The Last of England (on Kanopy, which has a lot of Jarman, inc The Tempest, Sebastiane, Blue)

Also on Kanopy: The Watermelon Woman

Maiesha Rashad and the Hip Huggers

some recipes from Soy Not Oi!

There’s a 1933 Mexican La Llorona movie (it’s just called La Llorona)

“The Most Beautiful Drowned Man in the World”

Shakespeare: Antony & Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale

“In the Bleak Midwinter” (Branagh film, poss available illegally on YouTube, also called “A Midwinter’s Tale”); also Branagh “Love’s Labours Lost”

Paul Robeson recorded Othello’s last speech and it’s apparently great.

Tongues Untied

You know what? I, Clavdivs.

Filthy Animals

Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

I think I’d enjoy reading Plutarch on Alcibiades

Reflections on the Revolution in France (& Letter from an Old Whig to a New Whig)

Under Western Eyes

The Naked Gun is on Netflix streaming!

Kawabata e.g. Snow Country

uh, Laudato Si

The Five Wounds: A Novel

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Donnie Darko (2001) is on Kanopy

The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

X-Statix; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; the new Watchmen series

Jim Henley’s music

How to Stay Alive in Iraq (a 2006 film by Salam Pax)

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost

Turgenev, “The Singers” (in A Sportsman’s Sketches)

Russian honey cake!

Карнавальная ночь (Soviet film about a wild New Year’s party—on YouTube?)

Last Call (a Holy Week novel!)

A thing that wouldn’t kill me is rereading the Big Book

There’s a 1988 film of “The Legend of the Holy Drinker”; also 1988, apparently whatever one might think of the movie “Clean and Sober,” Michael Keaton is fantastic as the lead?

John Tavener and Bjork, “Prayer of the Heart”

Should re-read Separate Rooms/Camere Separate

Pelican: Poems

https://jezebel.com/eat-pray-tail-i-wore-a-tail-for-1-week-and-learned-n-1787629800