💬 Friday Thread: What did you learn about your reading life in 2024? & What are you reading to start the new year?
Plus, what is one book you can't wait to read in 2025?
Hello reading friends,
Happy New Year! 🎉 I hope you’re welcoming 2025 in ways that bring you joy. Our regular Friday Thread is back and I’ve been so excited to ask you these questions to start the new year. If you’re new to this newsletter - WELCOME!- this Friday Thread is a place for me to do one of my very favorite things - ask questions- and for you to share your answers and connect with a bunch of really awesome readers.
I’ve been thinking not only about what I learned about my reading life in 2024 (thanks to Beatrice for the inspiration for this question), but more specifically, why do I read and how I can be inspired by and apply those reasons to my 2025 reading life.
One Major Thing I Learned About My Reading Life In 2024
I shared many of my 2024 reading lessons in my best books of the year episode with Katie , but something I (re) learned that I didn’t really elaborate on was that I really enjoy researching books - books that might fit my mood or a theme I want to focus on, books that other people aren’t talking about or maybe don’t even know about, books that have been “popular” in years past, etc- the point is I love to research books, then sample and hopefully land on something I really love and then surprise you, my readers/listeners with a book or two that you might not have come across on your own. This entire process brings me a lot of joy- and I got away from it in 2024.
I thought research was taking too much time away from reading, so I told myself to focus more on the new releases I saw everyone talking about and this shift in thinking led to me investing time and energy into reading books I wasn’t crazy about and/or not finishing quite a lot of books….either way it was time spent reading that wasn’t as fulfilling as it could be for me. Turns out I was right - researching books does in fact take time away from reading BUT I love it, it brings me joy AND in the past it’s led to me finding amazing under the radar or forgotten gems. So, back to researching books I go:)
Moving on, before I get to the questions of the week for you, I want to highlight something I’ve been thinking about since I read this post from
way back in the beginning of October - what are my reasons for reading? My initial thoughts were “because I love it and it entertains me.” But I agree with Sara, it’s possible - and often necessary- to dig deeper for the reasons why we read and in doing so, it can lead us to “choosing better books” for ourselves (to quote Sara).And then yesterday I was listening to this episode of The Goal Digger Podcast and Jenna Kutcher was talking about how we often get lost in the weeds of specific goal setting when we start the new year and maybe we need to embrace more flexible strategies. She was talking about business, but it made a light bulb go off in my head about applying it to our reading lives, especially when it comes to thinking about the reasons why we read. What she said was….
The key here is to focus less on the how and more on the why…why are you doing this in the first place? And then, let the journey evolve…let it unfold as you go on it. This is a shift away from a traditional all or nothing approach…
This is so true and ties in perfectly with what Sara wrote about in her post. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about my reasons for reading and I’ve come up with ten reasons that are specific to me, and will be my guiding lights for my 2025 reading. These are my WHYS of READING. If I get lost along the reading way, I will pull out this list and use them to get myself back on track:)
The 10 Reasons Why I Read
**questions to follow