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Intentional Reading

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Reading With Intention

A few years ago, I wrote about how I dislike annual reading goals. The act of setting up a number or goal in reading as a yearly resolution feels to me like making reading work, rather than an activity worth enjoying. That’s not to say there’s not value in it — for many readers, there definitely is — but for me, being intentional in my reading brings meaning to my reading life.

Intentional reading is being selective with my reading. I’ve been doing the reading thing long enough now to know what phrases or descriptions ring my bells. I also have a good sense of where I can improve in my reading and I create strategies for getting better. Over the last few years, for example, I recognized how important reading more women and more people of color was; I set the intention of only spending my money on books written by women or people of color. By setting that intention, I work hard to seek out those books, many of which I may otherwise never have discovered, and I’m surrounded by them. If I need to read a book, I have so many fantastic options in my home.

Last fall, I made a decision about my reading life. It was something I needed to do. I’d sort of hinted at needing to change things up in the summer, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to go about it or what it was that I needed to do. When your reading life and your work life are so intimately and intricately tied, it’s hard to tease one of them apart from the other and separate the things you know you should be reading for work-related reasons from those you want to read for you and only you. I love talking about books intelligently and I love being able to be part of a conversation about books that are sparking discussion within the YA and broader book community. But I’m also not, nor have I ever been, a reader who needs to be up on the latest, greatest, or big-budget titles. I rely on reviews by others of those titles to help guide my decisions on them.

I was intrigued by Annika’s post about having only read books by women since 2013. I love when people suss out patterns in their reading and then they go at those things with full force. That’s an intention. But more, when the comments on Annika’s post turned really bothersome — and I moderated those comments for a few days, so I saw some of the worst of it — I decided that taking on a similar intention in my reading would be worthwhile. Why did a woman choosing to read only women make people so angry? What is so scary about choosing to read only women?

Leila answers that question about the challenge in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate while also offering more compelling reasons for taking part in the intentional reading of women’ stories:

And, as I watched that all play out, rather than scaring me off, all of the garbage levelled at that essay—and, of course, at the woman who wrote it—resulted in the realization that this year, every single book that I’ve read that I have connected on a kindred-spirit level has been a book written by a woman. It made me realize that lately, while I haven’t felt particularly welcome in a community that I used to consider welcoming, that I have felt embraced and affirmed and heard and challenged—in a positive way—by those same authors, in those same books.

It made me realize that at the moment, I want to surround myself with women’s voices. That I want to put my energy into listening to them, engaging with them, learning from them, and amplifying them.

I began reading only women in November. Knowing my bookshelves are packed with books by women and people of color, I’ve had so many outstanding options to choose from. Sure, I’ve already missed out on reading a few books I’d been looking forward to, and I know there are more books I’m going to miss out on reading in this coming year. I’ve felt my heart sink opening up packages and finding ARCs by favorite male authors, knowing that I wouldn’t be reading them this year. But the beauty of books and reading is when you set an intention like reading only women, books written by men do not disappear. I can pick up the books I’ve been eager to read in 2017. Or 2018. Or 2019. Or 2020. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t going to vanish into the abyss; they’ll be there when I am ready to pick them up. With the way technology works, even books that might not otherwise have a long shelf life can stick around infinitely thanks to eformats. Likewise, talking about good books never gets tiring and it’s never out of style. Backlist discussions matter as much as, if not even more than, talking about titles the weeks leading up to or immediately after their release dates.

By intentionally limiting the books I’m reading, I’m discovering how my reading is expanding. It seems counterintuitive, but now, rather than sticking to a certain type or genre of book, I’m reaching a little further. I’m excited to read more memoirs by women. I’ve always wanted to do that, but with the intention of reading only women, now I am permitting myself to reach for those books when I may have otherwise kept pushing them off in exchange for something else more timely or more related to what I feel like I should be talking about. I’m thinking about the connections between those books and my own life. Those books and the lives of other women I care about. Those books and teenagers, both those who may be intrigued by the book at hand or those who might find themselves connecting on a personal level to those stories in the future.

My reading has slowed down a bit, too. I’m marking more passages, thinking more critically, and asking more questions of the books I’m enjoying. I’m finding the act of asking questions to be fulfilling more than the desire to seek answers to them. My thinking and engagement in books opens up in a different way when I choose to settle for uncertainty, rather than demand closure. I’ve never needed closure in my reading, but I’m letting myself enjoy the discomfort of not knowing.

I didn’t participate in the Read Harder challenge at Book Riot last year. It felt too restrictive to me in the same way other reading challenges are. But this year, I’m embracing the challenge. I’m really excited to try reading books that I otherwise wouldn’t, especially with my intention of reading only women sitting on top of it. I know I’ll enjoy a wider range of reading while digging even more deeply into the works of women. Rather than expanding only outward, beyond my comfort zone, I’ll also be moving inward, further down the hole of the types of voices and stories I’m hungry to read.

 

If you aren’t a person who feels driven by goals or numbers, you’re not alone. And if you are a person who is motivated by that, that’s great, too. We’re all different in our approaches to reading. There’s no one-size-fits-all, and there never should be. Spending time thinking about your own needs and interests as a reader and digging into them, questioning them, and redefining them, only makes you better able to talk with or connect to other readers. This is especially true when you work with teen readers who have so little time in their lives for pleasure reading as it is.

I’m excited to see what this year in reading brings. Since embracing intentionality in my reading life and redefining what that means as I go along, rather than once a year, I’m able to walk away at the close of each year feeling like I’ve grown as a reader and as a thinker.

Do you have any reading intentions this year? I’d love to hear them or about any challenges you’re taking on.

The Mid-Summer Review: On Backlist Reading

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Summer’s already half-way over, which is really hard for me to grasp. I love summer so much — I live for those hot, sticky days that virtually everyone else loathes. I credit living in central Texas for the appreciation. 
With taking a month off of blogging, I had a lot of opportunity to sit down and do some of the things on my reading goals list that I’d talked about in my post about slowing down. Rather than let myself succumb to the pressures of reading every new book months before it hit shelves, I decided to step back and catch up on some backlist and classic titles I’ve been meaning to read but hadn’t yet. 
The project so far has been going extremely well. In slowing down more than one part of my life with the blogging break, I was also able to take reading the books I wanted to at a much better pace. I’m not a particularly fast reader, but I dedicate a lot of time to reading; having a plan of books I wanted to read helped me more quickly move from one book to the next, without the stress of choosing what next. And since I wasn’t then sitting down feeling like I needed to write something thoughtful or coherent about the book, I was able to instead let the words and pieces I felt important permeate my mind and only my mind. 
In some ways, being less social with my reading made me appreciate reading for myself a little bit more. But it’s been interesting, too, not sharing those thoughts with fellow readers. It gives me time to work the things I need to work with into my own life, rather than spending time thinking about the broader take aways to an audience. 
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was the first book I picked up that I talked about in my initial post. It was also the first book since I graduated from college that I found myself wanting to take a pen to and mark as I read. It’s a short book, but reading with pen in hand forced me to slow down, to savor the language, and to mark the passages that really stood out to me. 
And you know, I didn’t write anything about the book yet. I feel I got a lot of value in reading it, taking the time to pull from it what I needed for me, and letting the rest of the pieces of story land within me how they were meant to land. I do plan on writing more in depth about this particular book, but it’s not something I feel pressure to hurry and talk about. I want that slow burn to take hold, and I want space between when I finished it to better inform what I have to say about it when I pick it up again to look through the things I marked while reading. They stood out to me for a reason in the process of reading — will they still hold up later? Will they resonate even more?
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood really hit me hard, which I completely expected going in. I knew I’d love it from the minute I started, but what I found most valuable about this particular reading experience was that I had zero baggage attached to the book. It wasn’t something I’d ever read before, and as I read, slurping down each of the words and images and carefully constructed sentences, I realized how much more I was getting out of the book than I ever would have gotten had I been assigned to read this in high school or college. I always loved classroom discussions, but I was always the person who chose to skip out on participation points because I don’t care to discuss out loud. I like the act of listening to others talk and thinking about how their points and ideas do or don’t fit into the framework of my own thinking about a text. It’s in that act that I’m able to consider a piece of art. That’s why writing about books works for me — I get as much private time thinking about other’s words and my own as I need before I share something. 
But what was interesting about reading Atwood’s book was that there were times I found myself sharing her words or wanting to talk about her words. I restrained myself, only copying one particular passage onto Tumblr to share, which was this:

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

The thing about the quote that haunts me is that it’s not just about sexism. It’s about racism. It’s about classism. It’s about ableism. It encompasses so many systems of oppression and yet…Atwood does it in such an economy of words that it’s a gut punch. 
I’ll be honest: I haven’t read a lot of other books on my goals list from earlier this summer. I’m definitely going to get to Americanah, and I’m definitely going to dive into Harry Potter. But beyond that, I’m actually finding interspersing these back list reads with titles I’m really looking forward to for the fall is helping me appreciate both a little more. Likewise, I have been reading more adult non-fiction, a category of books I have always loved but sort of pushed a bit to the side in favor of the newest, latest, and the upcoming. But this summer, I dove into reading Ta-Henisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, both of which should be required reading alongside Jessmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, which I read in late spring. All tackle the complexities of race in America. That’s such a simplification of what these books are about, but it’s the best way to adequately capture why reading them should be vital. I think for anyone who works with teens especially, it’s tough reading but it’s important. Reading those three book did a lot more for me in terms of thinking about race than my reread of To Kill A Mockingbird did. 
This summer I also blew through a huge pile of YA horror. I read about haunted houses and ghosts. In non-fiction, I spent time learning about the history of the board game Monopoly (which is yet another entry into the story of how women paved the way for influence but were overshadowed by men) and I learned about the Beanie Baby phenomenon of the late 90s — I hadn’t realized that so much of that frenzy took place in my backyard and how my own experience with and to beanie babies would have been different were I not a child in the Chicago suburbs. 
There’s still half a summer left, and I’m eager to see where my intentionally slowed-down reading takes me. I am absorbing more and I’m observing more. The pieces are sticking where they should, and I’m allowing my brain and my heart new places to explore. Pushing myself has been fun. It’s damn fun to walk into the library and pick up not just the normal stuff I’d read, but to stumble upon a new book of poetry from a favorite poet who I haven’t read in nearly a decade. 
Maybe it’s because I blog and because my job is to be on top of the book world, but slowing down and being deliberate has really been invaluable in terms of reconnecting with what reading is to me and what it adds to my life, my thinking, and my place in the world. In many ways, choosing to be quieter and slower has given me better capacity to speak and be critical in ways that hurrying, that feeling like I need to perform, hasn’t. 
I’m being a better listener now. 

On Becoming A Re-Reader

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I’ve never been a re-reader when it comes to books. Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. I’m generally not one to re-read. I like to think when I finish a book, I’ve read it and taken away the things I need to from it, and I can move on to the next books. 
I started this year’s reading a little differently though. There’s always a weird pressure to pick the ideal first book to start a year, as if it somehow sets the tone for how the rest of the year will go in books. I can’t be the only person who feels that way. But rather than succumb to the possibility of disappointment this year, I decided to crack open my all-time favorite book: Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant. 
Patchett’s book is one of the rare ones I’ve picked up and re-read over the course of my life, but it had been a good five or seven years since I last read it. For once, I didn’t worry about whether the magic of the book would be lost in the re-read. I let myself go at it with my whole heart, knowing that it’ll always been a book with a place in my heart. 
Back in the summer of 2006, my college roommate got married in her home state of Montana. My husband and I decided we’d drive out there from Iowa, then we’d go down to Austin, Texas, in order to look at the University of Texas, where I’d been thinking about going to library school. From the trip down the belly of the plain states, one of the things we decided we would do is stop in Alliance, Nebraska — half of the setting of Patchett’s work. Both of us were fans of the book, and we’d had the opportunity just months before that to go out to Los Angeles, together (my first trip on a plane!), where we’d both remarked about how that city will always be a “place” to us because of Patchett’s book. Alliance was not as exciting as Los Angeles, of course, but it was neat to be where the book had drawn inspiration.  
I curled up on the couch and read The Magician’s Assistant nearly cover-to-cover on New Years. I loved it, maybe even more than I had before. It was so interesting to think about the things I hadn’t considered in previous reads. The characters were much younger than I remembered them being, and part of that is simply that now I was of a different age myself and could compare my life experiences to their own. The language, the imagery, and the setting still hit me hard and reminded me why this book is so special to me. 
It was a good start to my reading year.
My re-reading didn’t begin and end there though. Just a couple of weeks later, after spending days with Leila at ALA talking about seminal YA titles, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would feel re-reading Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. I read it when it came out — when I was 15 — but hadn’t picked it up again since. I ordered it and picked it up to re-read, and I think I loved it even more than when it opened my eyes as a teenager. I had forgotten how amazingly voice-driven it was, and it’s Melinda’s voice that stays with me and makes me think about how powerful it is to have a voice and how much power one can wield with it. This book not only absolutely holds up, it will continue to hold up forever. It makes me want to revisit Wintergirls because Anderson is a writer I trust and I suspect that re-reading that book would crush me as much as Speak did. 

But not all re-reads bring such delight. I recently picked up To Kill A Mockingbird to re-read and found myself….bored. Not only was I bored with the reading experience, I didn’t feel any sense of hope or enjoyment out of the experience. If anything, I walked away from Lee’s classic wondering why it was such a beloved, widely-read book. Was it because it’s an easy, mostly-palatable examination of racism? Is it because we really enjoy being able to see the world through the construction of innocence Lee builds (and it’s constructed — she’s telling the story as an adult looking back at her youth, which is a detail easy to miss but vital to, I think, the endurance of the story and its message). Finishing this book didn’t put me on the “excited” side for Go Set A Watchman. I’m happy I re-read this one and reconsidered my feelings for it, as I was able to not only see the flaws in the story, but I was able to look at my own intellectual growth and see what does and doesn’t work for me. Idealism and idolization aren’t aspects of fiction I find endearing or enduring in my life. At least at this point.

Earlier this summer, I talked about how I planned on spending these few warm months catching up with back list titles and slowing down a bit to savor some classics I’ve missed out on. So far, it’s been a rousing success. One of the things I’d mentioned was finally getting around to Harry Potter. I should be fair: I’ve read the first four books in the series. It was back during the summer the final book came out, and I read it because I was working with teenagers who told me I needed to. And because of the circumstances under which I read it — a hot dorm room with no a/c or kitchen after long days in a hot classroom helped teach those same teenagers about Shakespeare — I never got the spark from them that I’d hoped to find.

I picked up the first three books last month at the bookstore and cannot wait to re-read them with my mind open and ready to be excited by them. Technically, half of the series is a re-read; the other half is a first read.

I’m finding that re-reading is bringing me to texts in a much different way now. After reading so much more and simply living much more, it’s interesting to see what things I take away on a new read and which things I don’t. I’m definitely motivated to revisit more books now and see what does and doesn’t work for me now, as compared to the person I was when I initially read it. I was recently told to revisit, of all things, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a book I never found myself quite enjoying like I hoped to. I was told now that I know about how the publishing world works, I’d appreciate it on a whole other level, and that sort of recommendation makes me excited about a re-read in a way I never anticipated.

And that’s the power of books — they grow with you, and like any relationship in your life, sometimes growing means becoming tighter and sometimes it means choosing to come to an amicable split.

Tell me: do you re-read? What books have you found to be immeasurably better upon re-read? Which have you found yourself disappointed in? What makes the difference to you?

How Do You Organize Your Books? (Follow-Up)

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Thanks to all who answered my informal poll about organization of your personal books! I thought the results were pretty interesting, if unscientific. Because we’re clearly all nerds, I thought you’d appreciate seeing the results in graph format. I’ve also shared some of the more interesting “Other” responses below.

Click on the graph to make it larger.
A total of 111 people responded, and most of you selected more than one option, which I assumed would be the case. Leading the pack is “by genre” with 52 responses, which was pretty surprising to me as it’s never something I’ve done before (though I’ve always wanted to). I also think it’s interesting since it seems like genre separation is something public libraries are moving away from. People clearly think it’s important for their personal collections, though.
In second place was “alphabetical order by author’s last name” with 41 responses. This one doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s a really easy organizational scheme both to set up and to use for locating titles afterward. On the opposite end, almost no one organizes their books by Dewey or Library of Congress. Either this means our readers don’t have much nonfiction (I realize fiction can be classified this way too, but that’s just silly – I’m looking at you, academic libraries), or these classification schemes just aren’t that easy. Or both. (I’m in the both camp.)
If I combine “wherever they’ll fit” and “organize? What is this word organize?” into one category, it comes in third place with 38 responses. These people seem to be in the same situation I have been in for the past several years: limited space means books just get shoved where they can fit, and organization is not as important as making sure the books don’t get stored in, say, the oven.
The “other” responses were the most interesting. Many of you wrote that you organize by size, which is something I should have included in the original poll. It’s something I do, too, without really realizing it. For example, I keep all my mass markets separate from my hardbacks (which is something I’ll probably continue to do in the new house). Many of you mentioned space as a factor, and a few mentioned giving away lots of books due to space or just not feeling the need to keep something you won’t read again.
Here are a few of my favorite “other” responses, with my own comments in italics:
  • I have a shelf dedicated just to books I haven’t read yet.  (I had this at my old place where we had a ton of built-ins, but in my current place, the books I haven’t read tend to just sit on tables.)
  • My other shelf is for books I’ve read and LOVED.
  • By books I’ve read and books that are unread and then by genre. (An organizational scheme after my own heart. Perhaps something I’ll do in my new place.)
  • Importance 
  • Personal interest
  • By imprint (all NYRB together, all Penguin black spines together, etc) (By far one of the nerdiest responses, and I mean that lovingly.)
  • If they were purchased for a class, they tend to stay with their “classmates.”
  • Release date then author’s last name
  • Loosely by genre– for example, British mysteries are separate from cozy mysteries, etc, but I do keep series together.
  • By “themes” and by favourites vs. non-favourites. (Organizing by favorites was a popular reply.)
  • Crammed into boxes by size. I only have space to have out books I am actively reading. Very unhappy. (This would make me unhappy too.)
  • Stream of consciousness
  • Alphabetical and then by publishing date except for series… it’s complicated.
  • Genre first, then beauty (series are kept together, no matter what).

There were a lot of great, more in-depth comments on the original post, too, so be sure to check it out if this topic interests you.

How Do You Organize Your Books?

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I just recently bought a house, and it’s big enough that there’s room for a dedicated personal library. I’m very excited! It presents a really fun challenge: how do I organize my books now that I have enough space to display all of them? (Previously, I had been just shoving a bookcase wherever it would fit and stacking books on tables. I expect I’ll probably continue to do that, but the majority of my books will now fit in a single room.)

I was in library school when I first learned that some people organize their books by color. The effect is really cool, and I don’t think it would be that difficult to find a particular book since I tend to remember what color my own books are. I actually have this IKEA bookshelf where I’ve organized a few of my books in roy g biv on their sides from top to bottom. It looks pretty neat. When I was first dating my boyfriend, he moved into a new apartment and I convinced him to let me organize his books by color because I really wanted to see what it would look like. I found out later that he hated the idea, but he let me do it anyway. (Aww.) I can definitely see the drawbacks. For example, a lot of series books wouldn’t be shelved together since they each have a different cover color, like the Harry Potter books.

Aside from the IKEA shelf, my books right now (prior to moving into the new house) are organized in the standard alphabetical order by author’s last name. Most of what I own is fiction, and the few nonfiction titles I have occupy a single shelf and they’re not really in any particular order.

I say that my fiction is organized in alpha order, but that’s true only to a certain extent. Because we have limited space in our rental, I’ve divided them into hardbacks and paperbacks. The hardbacks go against the back of the shelf and the paperbacks go in front of the hardbacks. Most of my shelves are deep enough that this works without any of the books hanging over the edge. In theory, this allows me to see all of my books at once. In practice, I still have to lean the paperbacks forward to see the title of the hardbacks. I hope that this won’t be necessary in the new place. My graphic novels I also keep separate, and they occupy just a couple of shelves next to my cookbooks in the kitchen. (You see what I mean about putting books wherever there’s space?)

When I was a kid/teen and living with my parents, I’d frequently take a couple of hours and reorganize my bookshelf in my bedroom for fun. I loved looking at all of my books and remembering a title I had forgotten I had. At the time, I had a single bookcase and it seemed like I had quite a lot of books. Teenage Kimberly would look at my current collection and feel awed. I know the trend nowadays is often to downsize material possessions, including book collections, but acquiring books has always made me feel good and I’ve come to like that aspect of my personality. I do have a lot of books that I haven’t yet read, but the fact that they’re there comforts me. I always have a book at hand, on almost any topic, whenever the itch hits me – sci fi, contemporary, romance, high fantasy, classic, middle grade, YA, adult. I strongly associate books with memories, so almost each title I pick up reminds me of something good, like the first time I attended a library conference or a particularly engaging undergrad literature class.

In my new house, I’ve been toying with the idea of organizing my books more like they’re organized in a library. I think I want to separate my adult books from my children’s and teen books, and I may even decide to separate them by genre as well. I doubt I’ll go the color route, since I’ll be sharing the space with my boyfriend’s books (we don’t interfile!) and it would look a little odd to have some shelves in the room color-coded and others not.

I thought it might be fun to take a little informal poll to see how our readers organize their personal book collections. Feel free to elaborate on your system in the comments!