New Year Readers’ Resolutions

‘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.

Some people combat this by setting targets for their reading, keeping track of the number of books or pages they read. I opted for a daily instalment of time – crucially, uninterrupted time, meaning the phone had to be off-limits for the duration. (No googling allowed, however tempting it might be to look up an interesting word or allusion; that way lies rabbitholes of internet distraction.)

With this modest goal in mind, I’ve managed to read all kinds of enjoyable things over the past year. In retraining a scattered attention span, you might think short books would be the best to go for, but I was surprised to find the opposite to be true. A particular delight has been a slow and unhurried progress through some 18th-century classics – the kind of sprawling, multi-volume novels and biographies which seem to belong to a more leisurely age than our own. Since you can’t read such books quickly, they demand that you live with them for weeks at a time.

In this way, I’ve spent some months recently living with Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Among the many pleasures of this marvellous book, with all its discursive, gossipy, inconsequential details about 18th-century literary life, is the bonus that it records plenty of Dr Johnson’s own characteristic opinions on reading. They are a heartening reminder that anxiety about what to read, or how to read better, is nothing new – and not wholly a product of the smartphone age.

Readers in Johnson’s time faced, as we do today, a challenge of abundance rather than dearth: too many books, competing with too many other pleasant ways to pass the time. Boswell records Johnson’s wry remark (certainly as true today as when he said it in 1783) that: ‘It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them’.

Johnson’s own remedy for this was to prioritise inclination in choosing what to read, rather than making it a duty. ‘A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good’, he said, and, on another occasion, ‘If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read’.

As a renowned man of letters, Johnson often surprised those who met him by such controversial practices as skim-reading, starting books halfway through, and giving up on them before the end. He vigorously defended this: ‘A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’

In his view of the psychology of reading, catching the attention and capitalising on inclination were essential. Have plenty of books around you, he advised Boswell, so that you can follow up the desire of the moment: ‘What you read then you will remember; but if you have not a book immediately ready, and the subject moulds in your mind, it is a chance if you have again a desire to study it.’ (Perhaps allowing curiosity to lead you down rabbitholes isn’t such a bad thing after all.)

This is all very reassuring for anyone who hopes to rediscover an enjoyment of reading. Johnson was a great maker and re-maker of resolutions, so while he might not advise turning reading into a duty, he would understand the desire to regain power over the attention. Managing to combine intention and inclination may be the key.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.