Megan Butcher

At the start of 2018, my goal was to read more. I’d been “a reader” for most of my life, but then… I dunno. Social media happened? Work stress happened? Something unclicked, and my reading had become mostly scrolling. 

Last January, I didn’t set a specific number of books as my goal. I didn’t want to be disappointed in myself if I didn’t meet it. One advantage to being in your 40s is knowing yourself better than you have before, and I know without a doubt that the higher the chance of me failing something, the higher the chance of me just giving up. Something to work on, yeah, but one of the ways I work on it is by working around it.

So: read more. Given that I’d read less than a book a month for the last several years, that felt like a goal easily accomplished.

It was clear by the spring that I had been successful. By July, I was reading a pretty steady 2 books per week: that’s when I thought maybe I’d shoot for 100 books in 2018. 

I hit that goal on Dec 24th, with Blue is the Warmest Color, and it felt fucking good.

That said, I’m not sure I’ll set a number on next year. Having a number definitely changed how I chose books. More graphic novels, for instance. Now, I really like graphic novels, but I don’t gravitate to them naturally. More e-books, so that if I felt the need to look at my phone, I could read instead of scroll. Less non-fiction, shorter fiction. A work friend also loaned me a Elena Ferrante novel in September, and my reaction was “Do you need this back before 2019? Because I am not going to hit a 100 books if I read that thing this fall.”

So: 2019. I will continue to Read More. Maybe not in numbers, but in time spent not scrolling.