Habits, History, and Rebirth Through Reading

Thus far, my plan to read 50–60 books a year, based on a new approach to how and what I read, has become one of the most fufilling disciplines of my life. I’ve just completed Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, an award-winning biography based on newly discovered manuscripts that shatter long-held fallacies regarding Gauguin. It’s my twenty-third book this year, with six months still to go.

It’s not numbers per se that interest me, but the cultivation of reading as a daily habit, as natural as brushing one’s teeth. I was inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which demonstrates how small, repeated behaviors, faithfully practiced, become almost automatic.

I’m reminded of B.F. Skinner. I was immersed in behaviorism in an intensive graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a paper on teaching oneself a new language. Years later, I learned Spanish by applying those very principles.

My new read is Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a scholarly masterpiece, riveting in its exploration of “unconformity”—the violent rupture where geological strata meet across immense reaches of time: earth’s history, from life’s primitive transition from water to land some 400 million years ago, prodigious in unconformity, cyclic cooling and warming, and sudden, often violent morphings into alien landscapes redolent of ever more evolved flora and fauna; reverberations of random catastrophe, the dominion of the temporal yielding at last the first vertebrates.

So too the human record bears its own unconformities: the clash of values, old and new, secular and religious, progressive and conservative; the collisions of mores, civilizations, and cultures.

I am fascinated, learning so many new things. That is why I relish reading, for with each challenging book I am reborn.