Tag: Reading

My Porch of Books

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

This year I decided to overhaul my reading habits by adopting what I call focused reading—pursuing a subject deeply rather than wandering endlessly from book to book. Instead of grazing randomly across titles, I try to follow a particular vein: reading several works that illuminate a topic, an author, an era, or a historical moment until the subject begins to feel textured and alive.

For years, though my reading had been eclectic, and not without pleasure, I began to sense that the most memorable intellectual experiences of my life had come, not from isolated books, but from immersion, one work leading naturally to another, ideas conversing across pages and centuries.

Reading then becomes less a pastime than a form of exploration, the mind moving gradually through a landscape rather than darting past it from the window of a passing train.

This year I began, as usual, with my annual eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction culled from authoritative sources. But going forward, I hope to limit that list to perhaps twenty titles—books that seem especially deserving of attention.

Alongside these, I’ve begun concentrating on several areas. This year they include the farming iconoclast Wendell Berry; the conservative economist Thomas Sowell; the late historian Walter Johnson; and the classical world—an area where I lack deeper exposure.

Next year, should I still walk the planet, I can imagine expanding the method further: perhaps ten topic areas, each composed of primary and secondary works. Five books per topic would yield roughly fifty works of focused reading, in addition to the twenty eclectic titles.

To give an example, one of this year’s areas of focus is the classical milieu. Staying within my five-book limit, I chose the following:

• The Republic — Plato
• Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
• The Bacchae — Euripides
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• Letters from a Stoic — Seneca the Younger

So far, my experiment is yielding dividends. I’ve committed to reading a minimum of fifty pages a day—assuming an average book length of about three hundred pages—and by mid-March I’ve completed twelve books. Last year, by contrast, I finished only twenty.

I should confess that Atomic Habits by James Clear helped inspire the discipline. Clear’s practical application of behavioral psychology, ideas traceable to B. F. Skinner, encouraged me to approach reading not merely as an aspiration but as a daily practice. Nowadays I cringe when my routine threatens the minimum and will sometimes delay sleep simply to complete my pages.

Such discipline may seem quaint in an age that offers a thousand distractions. Once it was linear television that eroded the nation’s reading habits; today, the Internet amplifies the trend. Last year, nearly half of Americans, 48.5 percent, did not read a single book. In Britain, the figure stood at 40 percent, according to a YouGov poll reported in the Times Literary Supplement.

Bottom line, Americans spend roughly four to five hours each day watching television or streaming media; in Britain, the average approaches four and a half hours. Platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook dominate much of that viewing.

Add the hours spent on smartphones, computers, and tablets and the total easily approaches seven hours a day, nearly the equivalent of a full workday, devoted to screens. Much of that time is spent watching movies, sports, or the endless scroll of digital entertainment.

Younger generations, though still fond of sports and films, increasingly inhabit the fast-moving currents of TikTok, YouTube, and video games.

Reading, by contrast, has steadily fallen out of fashion.

Nor has reading alone suffered. The social fabric has frayed as well. I remember when houses faced the street with broad porches where neighbors gathered in the evening, waiting the advent of night’s coolness, conversation drifting unhindered from one subject to another, board games on small tables, laughter an abundant sprinkling of neighborly fellowship.

This simple act of sitting together seemed reason enough to linger.

Today, many houses turn their porches to the rear, facing private yards rather than the street, as if community itself had quietly retreated.

Perhaps this is why books continue to matter.

Reading restores a community the modern world has forsaken.. Open a book and time folds in upon itself: Plato resumes his patient inquiry into justice; Seneca counsels composure in adversity; Ovid reminds us that the human story is one long sequence of transformations. The centuries speak again in voices at once distant and intimate.

Books, in this sense, comprise the old porch of civilization.

There we sit again with the living and the dead alike, the conversation unbroken. The room grows quiet, the hour late, yet the mind moves freely—wandering Athens with Aristotle, pausing in the tragic shadows of Euripides, or returning, perhaps a little wiser, to our own small corner of the world.

So I keep my modest covenant of fifty pages a day. Not simply to finish more books, though that is pleasant enough. I read because within those pages waits a larger company and a wider horizon.

In a distracted age, the turning of a page may be one of the last quiet forms of freedom left to us.

—rj

My Experiment in Simultaneous Reading

I’ve just finished Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America.

I’ve never read two books simultaneously before, but the pairing worked. The Goldfinch proved a genuine page-turner for me—a Dickensian, plot-driven suspense novel layered with thematic, even philosophical, meditations on life’s meaning.

Berry, by contrast, is at his consummate best in The Unsettling of America, distilling a passionate defense of the rural, the sanctity of non-industrial agriculture free of chemicals and heavy machinery. It is, finally, a lament for the erosion of community in our contemporary drift toward urbanization and accumulation. Berry is Thoreau à la mode. Simplicity, he reminds us, yields contentment.

I’m now reading Berry’s Jayber Crow, perhaps the finest introduction to his Port William novels, sixteen in number.

Since my experiment of reading two books at once has proven fruitful, I’m also reading A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer.

Iyer never disappoints in his genius for illuminating the subtle ambiences of disparate cultures. I confess I’m easy prey for this particular read as a longtime devotee of Japanese culture, now under threat. May ikigai, the art of pursuing one’s bliss, never meet its end.

My decision to weave a topical thread through my otherwise eclectic reading marks a meaningful turning in my reading approach. Last year I read twenty books. With ten already read this year, I anticipate—barring life’s interruptions—fifty or even sixty by year’s end.

But numbers surely are incidental. To read this way is to live more than one life, testing long held convictions, enlarging sympathies, and keeping my mind unsettled in the best sense of the word.

—rj

Fifty Morning Pages: Showing-up to Read

The other day I posted on my Brimmings blog a new method I’ve devised to inspire myself to read more—specifically, to aim for 80 books a year, assuming an average length of 300 pages. That works out to 24,000 pages annually, divided by 365 days.

I didn’t linger long over the arithmetic. What mattered was putting the idea immediately into practice. I set a daily goal of 50 pages, read first thing in the morning. For me, any attempt at habit formation has to be anchored in time. Once the day’s interruptions begin, resolve alone is no match for contingency.

Experience has taught me that it takes roughly four to six weeks of daily repetition for a habit to take hold. Once anchored, the reluctance to break a streak becomes a force in its own right. Acquiring a new habit, I’ve found, is less about willpower than about showing up.

The results have been gratifying. In the past two weeks I’ve finished two books, one of them nearly 600 pages. Fifty pages a day takes me about an hour. I could read faster, but speed isn’t my aim. I underline, annotate, argue with the text. I’m not a passive reader; I want to engage—agree, disagree, extend.

At this pace, I’ll read roughly 18,250 pages a year. Divided by 300 pages per book, that comes to just under 62 books annually. Not 80—but what a start. If I can raise my yearly total from my long-standing average of 20–25 books, I’ll consider the experiment a success.

Quantity, of course, is not an end in itself. The real aim is access to the best fiction and nonfiction available, the works that challenge and enlarge the mind. Increasingly, I’ve been drawn to cluster reading, concentrating on subjects where I feel thin or want deeper understanding.

What excites me most is the daily result: fifty pages read before the day properly begins. The reward is immediate, and reward, as we know, is integral to habit formation. Each book brings with it a flood of ideas—fuel for writing, and an invitation into community with others who share similar intellectual and aesthetic appetites.

—rj

Read Eighty Books a Year: A Reader’s Arithmetic:

Stephen King reads sixty or more books a year. I’m lucky if I reach twenty—and the disparity bothers me more than I care to admit. Not because I value quantity over quality, but because there are simply too many books I want to live with, too many voices I want time to answer back to.

Time flows from us like a running faucet. Time is our common currency granted daily. How do we spend it? It comes down to our priorities.

King has been candid about how he does it. He treats reading as a necessity, not a luxury, reading every day for two or three hours, sometimes more. As he puts it in On Writing: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

That rings true for me. When I write, it’s almost always in response to what I’ve read—to extend an argument, disagree with it, enthuse about it, or share it with others.

King refuses to slog through books that fail to engage him. He abandons them without guilt. Interest propels reading; boredom kills it. And he always has a book with him—reading while waiting, traveling, between tasks, or before bed. Those fragments accumulate.

The numbers themselves are demystifying. Suppose your goal is eighty books a year with an average length of 300 pages. That’s 24,000 pages annually. Divide by 365, and you arrive at roughly 66 pages a day. At a moderate pace of about 40 pages per hour, that comes to around an hour and forty minutes of daily reading.

That’s doable.

My final tip is one that has helped me most: read in clusters. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and commit to five or six books in that area.

Reading a single book from a wildly eclectic list can feel shallow; focused reading builds momentum, deepens understanding, and increases motivation.

This year, for example, I’ve chosen to immerse myself in Kentucky sage Wendell Berry—two biographies and three of Berry’s own books. Depth, it turns out, can be the best catalyst for volume.

—rj

My Passion for Literature: Reading’s Gifts

My fierce love for books has its ancient beginnings as a seven year old, sprawled on a Philly tenement floor, enthralled with a Christmas gift, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Moments ago I rediscovered this passage from France’s Michel Houellebecq, who has this special capacity to rattle the cages of accepted opinion—daring, provocative, forthright—writing novels you simply don’t walk away from.

I had read his Submission several years ago, an initial novel that launched his fame. His take on literature, a dying indulgence in a digital age, is poignant with meaning for me, for literature has surely been among life’s greatest gifts to me:

“…the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend” (Submission).

I have not found a more eloquent articulation of my own passion for literature and think often of what I would have missed had I not been introduced to literary reads—above all, to see past the literal text and be transported into a galaxy of resonance where words could mean beyond themselves, open new vistas, shaping life, capable of numinosity, a sense that life exceeds appearances, infinite in its labyrinthian corridors, a non-ending conversation with what is, has been, and will endure.

What Happens When I Read James Baldwin

There are many excellent Black writers, deserving of their fame, but it’s James Baldwin I keep returning to for his wisdom, sensitivity, and eloquence.

Whenever I read him, I find cleansing—a washing away of grievances, the soothing salve of empathy for those visited by life’s unfairness, the unanticipated gifts of seeing with new eyes and walking in another’s shoes.

Reading Baldwin, I find connection. Suffering is never isolated; it is universal:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people” (The Price of a Ticket, 1985).

—rj

On Reading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

I have now read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, remarkable in its stark, yet lyrical beauty reminiscent of Hemingway and Faulkner, intense in its palpable confrontation of goodness with evil; an elegy for a lost way of life; a saga of idealism’s betrayal; of mythic passage from innocence into knowledge offering no redemption, apart from the grace of endurance and a refusal to forfeit honor.

The traditional rancher spreads of west Texas have fallen on hard times, threatening a way of life. The novel opens appropriately with the death of central protagonist John Grady Cole’s grandfather, a former baron among ranch owners. The ranch, grown to 18,000 acres in 1871, has been sold, an inheritance lost. Working with horses is the only life Grady knows:

The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the norther blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. The boy’s name was Cole. John Grady Cole.

The first of a three novels known as the Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses underscores the death of the Western frontier, once ripe with promise of plenitude—fortunes to be made and dreams fulfilled.

Foregrounded in historical fact, a pastoral, unfenced way of life has fallen prey to change—the dividing of holdings among family, increased taxation, a drift of young people to the cities, mechanization, the invasion of industry, government’s encroachment, relentless droughts—above all, the railroad’s ubiquity, all of which McCarthy turns into metaphor for an agrarian culture bound by hard labor and a code of honor irretrievably lost. Metaphor becomes elegy.

All the Pretty Horses  narrates the journey of cowboys John Grady and his friend Lacey Rawlins from West Texas into Mexico, joined later by a mysterious youth, Jimmy Blevins, who owns a gun and rides an elegant bay mare, foreshadowing trouble ahead.

The novel abounds in resounding passages, poetic in resonance, like this one of stellar vastness, a cosmos indifferent to Man and of a fusion with nature and of a connection now severed:

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked out where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In that false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

Acquaintance with archetype helps readers tap more easily into the novel’s multiple levels of meaning—the hero archetype of initiation, trial, and return; the paradisiacal garden of northern Mexico’s La Purisima with its grassland abundance, grazing cattle of upwards of a thousand head, and 400 horses, attended by valeros, finding fulfillment in their labor; a siren temptress, Alejandra, the forbidden fruit, daughter of wealthy hacendado Don Héctor:

She passed five feet away and turned her fineboned face and looked full at him. She had blue eyes and she nodded or perhaps she only lowered her head.

The hero’s mentor appears, Dueña Alfonsa, great aunt of Alejandra, delivering stern warning from experience, that fate often annuls human wish and that economic and social determinism govern universally. Unlike traditional mentors, she’s unhelpful, even sinister, serving as forewarner and enforcer of social codes.

Not unexpectantly, trespass —Grady and Alejandra have become lovers—makes inevitable Grady’s expulsion from paradise, commencing an ordeal with uncertain outcome in a world where idealism is often judged as weakness and evil corrupts honor with impunity.

Unjustly imprisoned, Grady and Rawlins undergo brutal imprisonment for a crime they never committed. Blevins has  been executed earlier by a rogue officer. We have reached the novel’s nadir, a replay of mythic hell. A Mexican prison, governed by bribery and savagery, tests their courage and capacity to endure.

Dueña Alfonso buys their freedom, under condition he not return to La Purisima, only to have Grady resist and encounter Alejandra’s rejection.  Rawlings has returned to Texas.

Throughout, the novel remains faithful to its hero archetype—the hero, wiser now, returns to exact justice, wounded not only by a rifle’s bullets, but a pervasive knowledge of human capacity for caprice and injustice. Grady’s loss of his horses is inextricably linked to his identity. He returns to reclaim them, necessitating violence.

Restoration of wrong occurs, but not without a tarnished innocence and a sadness that knowledge brings.

Symbolism abounds, particularly through the horses of the narrative that give rise to the novel’s title. Virtual characters, they symbolize a dying way of life and nature’s nobility.

Grady’s affinity with horses affirms a vestige of traditional human communion with nature, once vibrant, but now vulnerable to a modern world in disconnect.

I have only one criticism, and that concerns its last fifty pages in which the prose splendor slackens and we arrive at a conclusion seemingly hurried and simplistic, anticlimactic in contrast to the mesmerizing narrative of its preceding pages that sustain a reader’s interest.

But make no mistake. McCarthy succeeds in writing an extraordinary novel, and I am embarrassed to have not caught-up with him sooner.

He passed from us in 2023 at age 89, having written twelve novels, several plays and short stories. Several of his books became movies.

He was his own person, disdaining celebrity status, living much of his life in poverty. Like Grady, he persevered. Recognition came late, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award, our nation’s highest literary award. He was 59 and now famous.

I intend to continue with his trilogy, then on to Blood Meridian, which many critics regard as his opus magnum.

Transcending time and geography, McCarthy rivals Faulkner as our greatest American author.

–rj

 

My Journey Through Books: From Childhood to Lifelong Learning

I’ve been a reading addict since childhood, when as a young boy I’d walk a mile—sometimes more—just to lose myself in a library’s cool hush, seated at a table, surrounded by shelf-lined books inviting adventure.

My love for animals found early confirmation in the Dr. Doolittle books I devoured. I read every one. Years later, that same fascination with the speech of creatures led me to Jane Goodall’s revelatory studies of chimpanzees—proof that empathy can grow into insight.

Another passion took root in the dusty bleachers of Shibe Park—later Connie Mack Stadium—in Philadelphia. I loved baseball with an intensity only children know, lingering outside the gates, hungry for autographs as players boarded their buses. I read passionately about my idols—Ruth, Gehrig, immortals who remain with me.

Travel books, too, called out to me. Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath on Pitcairn’s Island transported me to the South Seas, where I imaginatively romped through Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. In later years, that early enchantment led me to consider emigrating to New Zealand. I was, in fact, approved.

Languages fascinated me. One day, at ten, I brought home books in Russian from Philadelphia’s Free Library, expecting the Cyrillic script to magically transform itself into English. That early infatuation would one day carry me across the world to Russia and the homesteads of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.

I call myself an autodidact, though I’ve graduated from several reputable universities. I started behind most students, having fled a troubled home at seventeen, enlisting in the Air Force, which sent me to Korea. Our base library was a single room, yet its shelves were somehow populated with a few classics. One off-duty evening, I pulled down a book called Look Homeward, Angel. It changed my life.

After Korea, I read everything Thomas Wolfe wrote, visited his home in Asheville, eventually enrolling as a Ph.D. student at his alma mater—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Pulpit Hill” in Wolfe’s novel. On my first campus day, waiting to register for classes, I bumped into a retired professor, who asked what brought me to Chapel Hill. “Thomas Wolfe,” I said without hesitation.

A serendipity moment, that professor had known Wolfe. Becoming lifelong friends, they traveled together to prewar Germany, where Wolfe witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, which he would later feature in You Can’t Go Home Again. He shared anecdotes about Wolfe, who stood six feet, six inches. His hands too wide to use a typewriter, Wolfe wrote standing up, a refrigerator top serving for a desk.

Despite the scores of books I’ve read, there remain gaps I want to fill. The books I’ve read have been my faithful companions along life’s road, shaping who I am.

Were I granted another life, I think I’d come back as a librarian. No other choice comes close.

Finding New Ways to Choose Books I Want to Read

Every New Year’s Day for the past six years I’ve posted on Brimmings my annotated recommendations for the finest fiction and nonfiction reads. I spend hours culling my lists from authoritative sources. I give emphasis to canonical works, both domestic and international—books intellectually stimulating, challenging, and broadening, the kind that will still be read generations hence. Often one of my criteria has been to fill gaps in my own reading, those books I should have read long ago, but somehow missed.

But lately I’ve been musing on a new way of choosing books—more personal than public, more in keeping with my desire to read systematically, to fill in the areas I don’t know well but should.

While my published lists have value, they fall short of providing full acquaintance with an author through a single recommendation. A fragmented forest, bisected by a highway or development, comes to mind—isolated stands of trees cut off from the territorial expanse essential for their flourishing.

It used to be that when I encountered a great writer for the first time, I would read five books: two about the author (often biographies), and three by the author. It worked well—Tolstoy, for example.

But now I want to do better still.

Perhaps I could read not only by author but by theme—a focus on, say, the environment, doing a minimal five books, maybe beginning with the late E. O. Wilson, who never disappoints, or the sagacious Carl Sagan. Reading only The Great Gatsby hardly gives one the fullest sweep of Fitzgerald’s range and mastery. It’s like movie buffs: if you admire Tom Hanks, you don’t stop at one film.

To really round out my education, I should read chronologically, starting with the classics. I’ve read and taught Euripides’ Medea, but it’s only one play—nineteen of his tragedies survive.

So yes, I can focus on an author or a theme—or read chronologically across disciplines.

Here’s another approach: why not read geographically, and I mean largely internationally? I know so little of Chinese literature, philosophy, and culture—the same for India and Japan.

Or I could venture a European country that most readers overlook—Finland, for example, a nation whose people are addicted to both writing and reading, dark interminable Arctic nights surely contributing. I already have Finland on my list.

I’ll still publish my annual New Year’s list, but when push comes to shove, know that privately I’ll be trekking the road not taken.

–rj

What I Read and How I Choose

I am committed to reading the best that has been thought and said. Escapism and the utilitarian have never been my guides to what I read. In our age of competing stimuli, we’ve imperiled our ability to reflect, to think hard about life’s meaning and live it well.

Stillness is prerequisite for reflection that enlargens our thinking, renders us more humane, the finding time for the right read that nurtures the goodness that lies within us.

I am dismayed about contemporary classrooms, vastly different from those of my New England childhood that lent emphasis to the reads that expand awareness and humane endeavor.

Classicist Michael S. Rose sums up for me what today’s classrooms have lost with their inability to distinguish the wheat from the tares:

“The great catastrophe of our time is not that children fail to learn, but that they have never been taught what is worth knowing. The tragedy that unfolds daily in classrooms across the land is the presence of amnesia, a colossal forgetting of our inheritance. The inheritance of human genius and beauty—from Athens and Jerusalem, through Rome and the Renaissance, to Shakespeare’s London and Lincoln’s prairie—is what now stands in peril. It has not been violently seized; that would require too much effort and too much awareness of what was being lost. Rather, it has been carelessly misplaced, forgotten among the dazzling distractions of modernity” (Substack, Oct. 9, 2025).

—rj