New Year Readers’ Resolutions
How to read more? We might take instruction from a more leisurely age.
‘Do not praise the day before the evening’, the proverb says. By the same principle, it’s probably not wise to write about the success of last year’s New Year’s resolutions until the old year has safely passed. Although 2025 is not quite complete at the time of writing, however, I feel able to say already that my year was much improved by managing to keep one of last year’s resolutions.
This resolution – not an unusual one, I suspect – was to make more time for reading. Judging from conversations on social media and offline, many people are worried about the way that the distractions of modern technology interfere with the mental space they give to richer, more in-depth forms of reading. Books have never been more easily accessible – including treasuries of older material available out of copyright online – yet we seem to give them less and less of our attention.
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