You could read 50,000 words every day for the next ten years, and you’d only scratch the surface of the literary world. You’d be well-read by anyone’s standards, sure, but there would still be so much left to read. There are so many books. And many people don’t have over three hours a day to spend on reading. Even more people, I would contend, don’t have the patience to read for three hours every single day.
Yet in spite of this, we feel that we should be well-read. That we have no excuse for not having read the classics from War and Peace to The Count of Monte Cristo to East of Eden. Plus the pop psychology books being shared on social media, like Atomic Habits. Plus the works being adapted to television as of late. Fire and Blood, The Golden Compass, The Eye of the World, The Silmarillion, Foundation, and the list goes on.
We know reading is good for us. We know its something smart people do, and we consider ourselves smart people. It’s something we always say we will do as soon as we have the time to get around to it.
But maybe we start a book, and we’re able to focus for all of fifteen minutes before our phone distracts us. That’s okay. That’s a totally fine starting point. It doesn’t feel that way, though. We’re smart; we used to read a book a day back in elementary school. Never mind that we had fewer responsibilities, and never mind that those books used significantly less complex language than the ones we’re trying to read now. We’re adults, and we should be able to do this. In fact, we already should have done it, so the task should get done quickly and easily.
When it doesn’t, we get discouraged and abandon reading entirely.
Psychologically, it’s like the debtor who won’t start paying off loans because the small payments they can make feel like too little. So they let the debt continue to pile up rather than chipping away at the issue.
In our case of reading, though, the “debt” is entirely imagined. We don’t owe anyone any amount of words. We don’t have to have a deep knowledge of the entire literary canon to be an avid reader. Nor is intelligence contingent on reading alone. Yes, books can whet the mind and can teach so much, but there are other qualifiers that make someone smart.
We are not “lesser than” if we don’t read as much as we’d like.
And as soon as we accept that, the pressure disappears. Reading becomes enjoyable rather than a chore. We can be present, and we can chip away at our reading list one book at a time. It won’t matter how long it takes because the process is a delight. It becomes habit, and soon, we’ve read so much that we could pay off all our reading debt.
Except the debt never existed in the first place.
– AJG
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