This piece was first written as a New Year newsletter for BookJelly readers. I decided to publish it here as well because it captures what reading still means to me in a distracted, accelerated world. Consider it less a resolution and more a quiet reminder.
Today the calendar resets itself. We call it the New Year and behave as though something essential has changed overnight.
In truth, the world continues its habits. Nations posture. Markets speculate. Technologies promise salvation but deliver distraction. Work accelerates while attention thins. Old conflicts wear new uniforms and new anxieties borrow old fears.
And yet, January 1 has its uses. It gives us permission to pause.
You will be advised to read more this year. Faster, some might tell you. More efficiently, others might suggest. There will be lists, challenges and algorithms recommending books based on what people like you supposedly enjoyed last year.
Ignore most of this. Reading is not a fitness regime.
What you should read forward to instead is slowness. Difficulty. Surprise.
The coming year will be noisy. It already is. Opinions will multiply faster than understanding. Certainty will be sold cheaply. In such a world, books remain one of the few places where complexity is allowed to breathe.
You may find yourself distracted. That is normal. You may buy books you will not read immediately. That is healthy. After all, a private library is a statement of faith in the future version of yourself.
Read fiction not to escape reality, but to enlarge it. Read nonfiction not to win arguments, but to recognize how little we truly know.
Re-read the books that once shaped you. They will not say the same things twice.
And when the world feels particularly absurd, as it often does, remember this small comfort. Empires collapse. Ideologies expire. But somewhere, someone is still reading quietly and thinking carefully. Civilizations have been rebuilt on less.
Here’s to a year of difficult ideas and good books. Books that refuse to leave you unchanged.
Happy New Year.