2020 Resolution: Read More Books!

For 2020, I set for myself a (very) reasonable reading goal – one book per month or twelve books in one year. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I have set this goal for myself a few times before…and have failed miserably, but this year is a different story (pun intended). It is only March and I have already met my goal – twelve books! If you are struggling to make reading a habit, my biggest tip for success is…read two books at a time!

Reading two books at the same time once sounded impossible to me, until I thought of it like Netflix or Hulu. I am rarely watching just one show at any given time, so reading two books is just like switching channels. Another reason this trick was helpful for me, was that I used to think of reading as a check list item, as if reading was only an efficient use of time if it was clearly teaching me something. Unfortunately, self-improvement and non-fiction can be a little dry. Still, I didn’t want to give up on these genres completely. Therefore, I found a way to balance these needs – I have a book for business (my “work book”) and a book for pleasure (my “fun book”). My “work book” is what I read on my daily commute. It gets my day started gradually by gearing up my brain before I get into the office. My “fun book” is what I read when I’m at home, on the weekends, or on vacation. In my reading list below, I’ll note which are “work books” and which are “fun books”, so that you can see what I mean.

1. “A World in Disarray” by Richard Haas *WORK*
2. “An Unwanted Guest” by Shari Lapena *FUN*
3. “Gravity is the Thing” by Jaclyn Moriarty *FUN*           
4. “A Stranger in the House” by Shari Lapena *FUN*
5. “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens *FUN*
6. “Sprint” by Jake Knapp *WORK*
7. “City of Thieves” by David Benioff *FUN*
8. “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead *FUN*
9. “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki *WORK*
10. “Never Look Back” by Alison Gaylin *FUN*
11. “I Found You” by Lisa Jewell *FUN*
12. “Find Her” by Lisa Gardner *FUN*

Now that we are all reading fiends, we have a new set of problems to solve – books are expensive, take up a lot of space, and hoarding pounds of paper in your home isn’t exactly environmentally-friendly. My solution, I joined the public library. It was free to join and I can borrow up to seven books at a time! I am saving money and I am saving space, a limited resource in Bay Area apartments. As for the environmental angle, borrowing books rather than buying them, in my opinion, is being part of the solution rather than the problem. It was difficult to find a reliable source of information on how many books are printed every year, but I found a few figures and without getting too deep in the weeds, it is possible that up to 750K books are printed every year in the US alone. At roughly 33, 500-page books per tree, that is almost 19K trees! Now, I understand we cannot just print one copy of each book for the whole world to share, but again, my “go green” philosophy is, whenever possible, be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I would love to hear from you if this inspires you to join your local public library or if you have any book recommendations to share! As always, thanks for reading and I’m so glad you’re here!