I’m one of those people who hate New Year’s resolutions, but since the turning over of one year to the next always sets me to thinking about what I’d like to improve about my life, I always go ahead and make a couple. Since I limit myself to one or two that feel do-able, I usually fulfill them, or at least get close enough.
This year? Read books again. Simple enough. But this is one I’ve failed at repeatedly.
The crazy thing is, I used to love to read. I read a minimum of 50 books a year, split pretty evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I was a precocious reader as a kid; I don’t even remember learning how to do it, but I do remember, at the age of three, impressing adults by reading out loud from the local paper. I was the kid who got in trouble in elementary school for sneak-reading outside literature in my lap, hidden by my desk, in class. Books got me through a solitary, unhappy childhood and angsty teen years. As a young adult, living in the Bay Area with my own money to spend, bookstores were my wonderlands. In my late twenties, I worked as a bookseller, a used book buyer, and for a few years made money selling used books online.
So what killed reading for me? Short answer: grad school. Or, rather, the road to finishing a BA in my early 30s started killing it through a process of slow strangulation. But grad school itself pressed the fatal, suffocating pillow over its pallid and gasping face, then laid it out in the coffin, before hammering down and countersinking every last nail.
During those years, I had a heavy reading load, and since I was taking graduate seminars as an undergrad (having been fast-tracked into academia by my undergrad mentor, with my full consent and cooperation, because getting a PhD and becoming a professor appealed to my ego), I had to provide a written analysis of one book for each seminar per week, plus show up and participate in discussion of it. I was typically taking two graduate seminars, plus one or two other classes, and it felt like all I did was read books I didn’t really want to read (many of which were heavily jargon-laden and dependent upon various theoretical approaches to interpretation), and frankly, a lot of them were a hard slog.
And grad school? It was more of that, but cranked up to eleven, and on top of that, I realized that I was too independent-minded politically to get along in academia (which is a bubble-world in which everyone is enchanted by terrible, unworkable, and, too often, ultimately inhumane ideas), and would thus have to feign agreement if I was to get anywhere. This was way back in 2005, and already the creep toward ideological purity that has made academia a hellscape was well underway.
On top of that, there were very few tenure-track jobs to be had in my field (much less my specialty), unless you were astoundingly brilliant, attended one of the Ivies, or were from an underrepresented group. The big annual conference in my field happened to be in my own city that year, and I not only went, I chatted with a lot of the newly-minted PhDs who were there as job seekers, doing rounds of interviews. Shit was bleak, man.
So I made it two academic quarters into my first year of grad school before quitting. I consoled myself with the thought that hey, I was smart enough to get into graduate program, with full funding, in the first place! But I was also smart enough to recognize a road that was unlikely to lead me to where I thought I wanted to go (no matter how much my professors assured me otherwise, because hey, TAs don’t grow on trees), and to stop walking any further down it.
I’ve never regretted, for even an instant, quitting grad school. Time has proven me right. But re-emerging after three years of hard grinding toward an eventual academic career left me feeling adrift. I couldn’t relax; I made plans to write a novel, in a historical setting, which of course meant doing research, because I wanted it to be unimpeachably accurate. So I checked out a big stack of books from the university library while I still could.
And those books just sat there. Eventually, after three or four overdue notices, I hauled them back down to campus and put them in the drop box, but while I had them in my possession I just couldn’t bring myself to crack them.
Months went by. I bought books, fully intending to read them, but once I got them home they went into a stack somewhere, and I lost all interest. Sometimes, I’d pick up a book, decide that goddamn it, I was going to read the thing—only to abandon it a few pages in.
The only books I managed to read in the entire first year after quitting grad school were the Harry Potter series. Seriously, that was it.
In the 21 years since, I’ve managed to finish maybe one book a year. Of course, I keep buying them, and my to-be-read shelves, and the sheer number of started-and-abandoned books that still have faded bookmarks in them where I left off, is an embarrassment of riches. I’ve begun joking that my place in the book-buying ecosystem is now as a repository for unread copies of books that, long after they’ve gone out of print, will delight the future nerds who buy them.
And this, dear reader, is the situation I most want to change in 2026. I don’t care about losing weight, or getting fit, or making more money, or finding romance; I just want to get back to that old love of reading, even if I have to claw my way there.
So of course I’ve chosen my first book, and that book is War and Peace, because clearly, I am an idiot. But I’m already on page 23, which is further than I’ve managed to get into a lot of less-demanding books, so hey, maybe it’ll work out. It’s a start, and it’s not like I don’t have plenty of other books to switch to.
