1. Carry a book with you

You carry what you need. Your wallet travels around town with you and, if you’re like 99% of the population, so does your phone. I suggest bringing a book with you. Waiting for a kid to get out of school? Pop open that book and inhale a few paragraphs. Sitting in the doctor’s office? Prime reading time! Is the weather nice and warm? Instead of rushing from activity to activity, reward yourself with an iced coffee and 20 minutes of reading time in the car where nobody can disturb you. The family tv show is a little boring? Finish off a chapter. Books are read word by word and each little bit gets you to the end goal of having completed an entire book.

2. Utilize your library

Librarians are good—REALLY good—at what they do, and part of what they do is make books available to the public. I find so many quality books by simply wandering into my local library and seeing what’s on display. New fiction. New nonfiction. Recipe books. YA material. Beyond that, the aisles are filled with gems, and the nonfiction sections are a particular favorite. In the past several years as I’ve been hunting for books to interest my child (that’s another post) I’ve found my curiosity piqued by the Young Adult Nonfiction section. Want to know a little bit more about women’s suffrage? Here’s a book or 10 on suffragettes! Interested in who invented the bicycle? Well, here’s a small book about that! The adult nonfiction section has my heart and I could spend a long time perusing the gems in there.

Besides wandering the library, it helps to figure out HOW to procure the books you want. I asked my reading friends lots of questions and learned how to place online holds on books, download books to a Kindle, and borrow audiobooks. Now I’ll open a tab to a recommended book list (in 2019 I started following Reese Witherspoon’s book club for recs) and then quickly add several to my ‘holds’ list at the local library. I get an email alert when the books are in, and I have several days to pick them up. My library charges $0.50 if you don’t get the book—–and I can live with that.

Note: I still buy books and I have two general guiding principles for when to buy them. 1) I like to underline and mark up my Christian non-fiction so I often buy those. 2) I give myself permission to buy fun paperback fiction when I travel. Those are the books that usually end up in my giveaway piles unless they are really really good.

3. Read fiction and nonfiction simultaneously

Like I said before, completing a book happens little by little. Rarely does anyone have great swaths of time to consume a book. Cracking open a few books at a time allows you to invest in more than one text, and the simplest way to do this is to have different kinds of books going. If you’re reading a book of poetry, I highly recommend also having a fiction book on the side. But for me, I’m always wanting to sharpen my knowledge of the Bible and God’s kingdom, so I love working through a Christian nonfiction text while also reading a fun story. I can eat up that story pretty fast, but the meat and potatoes work comes from plodding through something that requires more investigation and reflection—–both brain and heart work, really. So if I have several books running at once then I can use different parts of my mind while still working towards completing them all.

4. Read out loud

Grab a glass of water, maybe run a humidifier or suck on a cough drop first, and get to reading out loud. Even if it’s just you and your pet, words are meant to be said aloud and there is great beauty in hearing what a text sounds like. And bonus points if there’s dialogue and you want to employ an accent to make it more interesting. Life is too short to not explore the beauty of the written word in community! Read to your children, oh please read to your children. As long as they will tolerate you, read to them. Read to your husband, read to yourself, read to a friend. Hear the words as they were meant to be heard and luxuriate in a story with others around. The shared experience is worth more than you know.

5. Put your phone down

Yes, you’ve got 101 tabs open on every topic from raising a compassionate kid to how to compost, but take a bit of time to consider what all those tabs are doing to your brain and, specifically, to your attention span. Not going to be preachy here—if anything I’m preaching to myself because I’ve got a raging phone addiction—but the blips and comments online are generally not helpful to your personal growth and well being.

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Okay, that’s all for me right now. Do you have any tips you’d add to this list?

At the start of a brand new year I’ve got several books available around the house. I’m invested in Eight Dates by the fantastic marriage therapist John Gottman. Next to my bed is a fiction book I haven’t cracked open yet, a birthday present (On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior), and book five of Harry Potter which Livia and I put down some time ago and still need to finish. We’re also halfway through Romeo and Juliet so perhaps we should actually finish it. I’m feeling the itch for some really good Christian literature, too, and I’ve got several to choose from.

What are you reading in 2020?