Tag: reading

A Year of Reading and Renewal: Reflections on 52+ Books in 2025

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

I started this year with a strange mix of endings and fresh beginnings. The email confirming my promotion to full professor arrived in early January while I was making coffee, and I remember feeling not triumph but a kind of wry tenderness towards my younger self who had wanted this so badly. Titles come long after the inner effort that earns them, and the moment of arrival is often anticlimactic, yet it still signifies something. Three months later, I stepped down after six years as Associate Dean, closing a chapter of leadership that had greatly shaped my professional identity.

At the beginning of the year, I set a Goodreads challenge to read 52 books, mostly as a reminder to read not only in my discipline but also beyond it, and to let myself wander into other registers. What I didn’t expect was just how deeply the year’s reading would fold into everything else I was doing. The books became companions to the rhythms of the sabbatical, to the shifting layers of my personal work, and to the communities that formed around me as welcomed additions.

One of the brightest of those communities was the Surbiton Literary Salon, first dreamed up over dinner in January with the simplest impulse: the desire to talk about books in good company at my local pub. We began with a handful of us in a small room in our local, a bottle of wine circulating and no agenda beyond the shared pleasure of reading. That little gathering grew into a genuinely warm and inspirational group that expanded month after month, and together we travelled from the quiet, meditative brilliance of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital to the philosophical charm of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book that sparked one of our liveliest discussions about intelligence, loneliness, and the elegance of human contradiction. From there, we moved through Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, which reignited my intense desire to visit Japan, and The Satsuma Complex, which divided the group’s opinions more than any other.

Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries brought a welcome return to lightness, those bright, English comic notes that somehow disguise their structural precision. Harriet Tyce’s Blood Orange plunged us into a much darker register, and it was astonishing how different members of the group held different emotional keys to it. And then The Resilience Project brought an earnestness and sincerity that balanced the year’s heavier themes. The Women opened unexpectedly deep discussions about duty, silence, and the emotional architecture of courage, and Festive Spirits by Kate Atkinson arrived just as the nights grew longer. By the end of the year, the Salon had become, for me and the 15 or so of us who gather every month in a friend’s well-appointed front room, a steady, quietly joyful ritual of sharing our reflections on books. A reminder that literature is not an individual encounter but a relational one.

Parallel to this, I began leading a Sunday evening Course in Miracles study group, which continues to deepen. Guiding a group through A Course in Miracles is a very different kind of teaching that depends less on interpretation and more on presence. We read it in philosophical, ecumenical language, without doctrinal commitments, which seems to open a gentler, more spacious terrain. Each week invites a shift in perception: forgiveness not as moral duty but as a choice of vision, responsibility not as blame but as agency, devotion not as obedience but as attention. The text asks much of us—stillness, honesty, love—and somehow the group met it with all three.

Then there was The Art of Creative Practice, the coaching and creative development circle I founded on Meetup. I began it lightly in September with free coworking sessions, almost experimentally, but it quickly grew into one of the most rewarding parts of my year. The group attracted writers, artists, and creatives of all stripes who were less interested in productivity hacks than in understanding the emotional and psychological textures that underpin their work. What has struck me most is the courage people have brought to the process, the willingness to inhabit contradiction and complexity with humour and grace. It reminded me again that creativity is not a technique but a relationship with one’s own inner landscape.

All of this shaped the way I read. Books became part of an ongoing unfolding of my year, sometimes offering clarity, sometimes challenge, sometimes simple companionship. Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person and Judith Orloff’s The Empath’s Survival Guide, for example, woven between sessions of creative coaching, gave me new language for the quieter traits that many group members shared but rarely articulated. These texts reframed sensitivity not as fragility but as attunement, something to be cultivated, not resisted. It created echoes with other books I encountered this year that explored the subtler dimensions of mind and meaning: Steve Hagen’s Buddhism Plain & Simple, Yung Pueblo’s Clarity & Connection, and Marianne Williamson’s writings on the intersections of love, perception, and the ethical imagination. Attending a live weekend workshop with Williamson this summer was one of my highlights of the year.

Money and prosperity, too, became an unexpected theme, not in the acquisitive sense, but as a study of relationship and mindset. Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money, Catherine Ponder’s The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, and Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind all, in different ways, opened space for reconsidering the beliefs we inherit about value, sufficiency, and trust. These books arrived alongside my own work in reshaping my financial habits and sense of abundance, and they echoed the larger project of creating a life that feels aligned, intentional, and quietly elegant.

Some books were simply pleasures that reoriented me. Maugham’s The Magician—a thinly veiled portrait of Aleister Crowley—was delightfully pulpy and relevant to my occult research. Fiction formed its own thread of discovery. Reading Madame Bovary again reminded me of the surgical precision of Flaubert’s attention, the cruelty and tenderness interwoven in the same gesture. Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude returned me to a world that felt like a dream I once lived inside, a universe where the magical and the mundane breathe the same air. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury challenged me all over again, as it always does, and Brave New World felt unnervingly prescient (and not at all what I remember it being when I read it years ago). 

As I write this, I’m preparing the next cycle of work, finishing my book, continuing The Art of Creative Practice, deepening into the Course in Miracles Study Group, tending the Surbiton Literary Salon, and beginning several new coaching cohorts in the new year. If this year taught me anything, it’s that intellectual life thrives when held in community, when nourished by a wide diet of ideas, and when approached not with performance but with presence. Here’s to another year of reading, learning, becoming—and to the books that will meet us where we are, and gently carry us somewhere new.

My 2025 Reading List

  • Ackroyd, Peter, Introducing Swedenborg
  • Aron, Elaine N., The Highly Sensitive Person
  • Atkinson, Kate, Festive Spirits: Three Christmas Stories
  • Barbery, Muriel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
  • Brann, Amy, Neuroscience for Coaches
  • Brookner, Anita, Hotel du Lac
  • Brown, Dan, The Secret of Secrets
  • Caine, Margaret, Footloose in Cornish Folklore
  • Chanek, Jack, Tarot for the Magically Inclined
  • Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
  • Cuylenburg, Hugh van, The Resilience Project
  • Davies, Owen, Art of the Grimoire
  • Dean, Liz, The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Spreads
  • Eggers, Dave, The Monk of Mokha
  • Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby
  • Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary
  • Garcia Marqués, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Hagen, Steve, Buddhism Plain & Simple
  • Hannah, Kristin, The Women
  • Harvey, Samantha,  Orbital
  • Hayes, Nick, Wild Service
  • Hollinghurst, Alan, Our Evenings
  • Holiday, Ryan, Courage Is Calling; Right Thing, Right Now
  • Horowitz, Mitch, Occult America
  • Houston, Keith, The Book
  • Kerr, Gordon, A Short History of Coffee
  • Matthews, Michael, Bigger Leaner Stronger
  • Matousek, Mark, Lessons from an American Stoic
  • Mortimer, Bob, The Satsuma Complex
  • Morlok, Franziska, Bookbinding
  • Murphy, Joseph, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
  • Osman, Richard, The Impossible Fortune
  • Ponder, Catherine, The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity
  • Pueblo, Yung, Clarity & Connection
  • Saumarez Smith, Ferdinand, Eleusis and Enlightenment
  • Sertillanges, Antonin,The Intellectual Life
  • Shen Congwen,  Border Town
  • Stibal, Vianna, Seven Planes of Existence; You and the Creator; Digging for Beliefs; Advanced ThetaHealing; ThetaHealing
  • Tarbuck, Alice, A Spell in the Wild
  • Thirkell, Angela, Wild Strawberries
  • Twist, Lynne, The Soul of Money
  • Tyce, Harriet, Blood Orange
  • Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Lolly Willowes
  • Williamson, Marianne, The Law of Divine Compensation; The Mystic Jesus
  • Wolynn, Mark, It Didn’t Start With You
  • Wynn-Williams, Sarah, Careless People
  • Yagisawa, Satoshi, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Upcoming Events

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Preserving Ideas

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Last weekend I spent a few hours wandering through the Small Publishers Fair in London, where tables of hand-bound chapbooks, risograph zines, and small press essays lined Conway Hall like devotional offerings to the printed word. There was something really wonderful about it: a room buzzing not with algorithmic chatter, but with paper, ink, and the human hand.

Lately, this question of preserving ideas has been preoccupying me. As I’ve been working on my forthcoming projects—both scholarly and personal—I’ve found myself turning again to the physicality of books, not just as containers of knowledge but as archives of consciousness. The handmade box-making I’ve been experimenting with at home (a small project that began as a way to store my growing stack of old notebooks) has become a kind of meditative practice: measuring, cutting, folding, gluing, all in careful rhythm. It’s taught me something about form and memory—about how enclosure can protect, but also invite reverence.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that every book has a double life: one as a vessel of ideas, and another as an artefact that carries the traces of its readers. Marginalia, stains, folded corners all become evidence of encounter. When I teach or write about modernism, I’m always struck by how that movement both exalted and feared this materiality. Woolf, Joyce, and their contemporaries wanted language to transcend its own physical limits, yet they depended utterly on print.

My own shelves are full of books that now hold more of me than of their authors, filling with underlinings, exclamation marks, and the occasional coffee ring or grease smear. They are records not only of what I’ve read, but of who I was when I read it. In a sense, they preserve moments of thought—snapshots of consciousness mid-formation. To lose those, or to surrender entirely to digital ephemerality, would be to lose something essential about how we think in time.

There’s a similar intimacy in the act of making. When I’m gluing the corners of a handmade box or rolling out pastry dough, I notice how my thinking slows, finds rhythm in repetition. Craft requires patience, but it also invites reflection—it’s an embodied philosophy. David Pye, in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, distinguishes between the “workmanship of risk” (where every action could alter the outcome) and the “workmanship of certainty” (where machines guarantee precision). The handmade book, like the handwritten note, belongs to the first category: it lives in the space of risk, imperfection, and care.

In an era of constant digital revision, the printed page still says: this is what I thought, then. It invites us into a conversation with our past selves. Even my old notebooks, boxed and labelled, feel like small dialogues across time—some pages embarrassedly naive, others startlingly prescient.

There’s a line from Italo Calvino that I often come back to: “The classics are those books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to go away and when they hide in the folds of memory.” I think the same could be said of our own notes, letters, recipes, and marginalia. They refuse to go away; they wait patiently for us to rediscover them.

At the Small Publishers Fair, I was reminded how vibrant this world of small-scale making still is. Stalls dedicated to poetry, philosophy, and experimental art books, each one a testament to the persistence of the tactile imagination. Many of the presses represented there are acts of devotion, sustained by people who believe that ideas deserve bodies. To hold one of their books is to participate in a lineage of care: the slow publishing ethos that values depth over reach.

In the evenings lately, with autumn deepening and the smell of spiced raisins still in the kitchen, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it means to live archivally, or, to put it another way, to be a steward of one’s own thought. It’s a gentle calling, really: to keep what matters, let go of what doesn’t, and tend the rest with attention.

So whether you’re keeping a commonplace book, baking from a family recipe, or printing a limited-run essay for a small press, you are participating in this broader human act of preservation. You’re ensuring that thought continues to have texture—that it lives in the world not just as code or content, but as something we can touch, smell, and remember.

And maybe that’s what the physical book still teaches us, in its quiet way: that ideas, like relationships, need form to flourish. They ask for bodies, boxes, bindings, and for the gentle friction of being held.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

Book Buying as a Practice of Becoming

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

As I usually do, I bought a used copy of this month’s selection for my neighbourhood book club: Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner’s marvellous 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel about making sense of people and the shame we inhabit. The copy I received was a marvellous 1980s edition, its cover gently worn, the paper slightly yellowed with age. Inside was an inscription in assertive biro: ‘To Rita with love, Pete xxx. April 86.‘

I love finding ephemera like that in used books (once, I found a four-leaf clover that a child had pressed between pages and forgotten in 1972). That simple handwritten note in Hotel du Lac became a fragment of someone else’s life, a small piece of history folded into my own. It reminded me that buying a book is rarely just about acquiring a text — it is, at its best and fullest expression, a gesture of self-formation. Choosing a book can be a conscious act of orienting yourself toward a new way of thinking, a new rhythm of attention, a new life project. In that way, book buying is a practice of becoming.

Every book purchase marks a threshold, a crossing into a new state of thought, feeling, or attention. When I choose a book, I am often choosing not only the ideas it contains but also the possibility of becoming someone who holds those ideas. That threshold might be a commitment to learn something new, to deepen a habit, or to allow oneself to enter an unfamiliar world.

For me, Hotel du Lac became not just a novel but a threshold to conversation — in our book club meeting tonight we will speak about solitude, desire, love, and the quiet transformations of everyday life, I’m sure. The purchase itself became the first step into that dialogue.

Choosing which books to buy is also an ethical act — a choice about the economy of your attention and the kind of knowledge you wish to cultivate. In our age of algorithm-driven recommendations and one-click convenience, the act of selecting a book has become even more deliberate. It is an assertion: of attention, of values, of resistance to the noise of the digital marketplace.

I try to keep this in mind. When I choose a book, I am choosing the kind of life I wish to live. That is why I prefer second-hand bookshops, curated lists, and the serendipity of browsing. The gift of finding a well-loved copy of Hotel du Lac was not just about economy but about entering into a relationship with the book that carries the traces of other readers and a past moment in time.

My first job as a teenager was as a bookseller at Borders Books, and I’ll never forget the linger last hour before closing when the shop was almost empty and I wandered to and fro reshelving books that had been cast aside and getting lost myself in the shelves. There is something profound in the act of browsing: the way attention moves differently among stacks of books, the accidental discoveries, the impulse that turns browsing into a purchase. This ritual carries a rhythm: the searching, the selection, the return home, the opening of the book for the first time. It is a small act of pilgrimage.

This ritual has shifted for me over recent years. I buy more online and second-hand now, but I also savour the moments when I am in a physical shop, taking time to feel the books, the paper, the weight of them in my hands. Buying a book in that way is an act of attention — a slow, deliberate counterpoint to the speed of modern life.

The books we choose to live with often become companions in our ongoing process of becoming. That inscription in Hotel du Lac reminded me of this. A book is not simply an object; it is a living presence. It carries the imprint of its past readers and acquires a new life each time it meets another. In choosing it, we invite it into our own narrative.

Some books grow with us. They take on new meaning as we return to them at different stages of life. They become landmarks in our own inner journeys. It’s for that reason that buying books can be a form of investment in the future self we aspire to become.

When I buy a book, I am buying a possibility: a possibility of becoming a reader who thinks differently, who sees differently, who lives differently. Each purchase is a small apprenticeship in self-making.

Here are some ways to make book buying a mindful practice:

  • Keep a wishlist and revisit it periodically.
  • Choose one book that challenges your usual thinking every month.
  • Seek out books outside your comfort zone.
  • Return to books that have shaped you before.

If we approach book buying as a practice of becoming, every purchase becomes a small act of self-cultivation. This month, my purchase of Hotel du Lac was not just for a book club — it became a quiet practice of curiosity, of connecting with a history, of choosing to open myself to a particular conversation. In this way, every book bought with attention becomes a threshold, an ethical choice, a ritual, a companion, and an investment in becoming.

If you choose to see book buying this way, your library becomes not simply a collection of texts but a landscape of your own growth. What will your next purchase become for you?

Upcoming Events

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More to Explore

The Home Library as a Mirror of the Mind

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

A personal library is never just a collection of books. It is a portrait of the self across time, and you can learn a huge amount about a person by the books that they have chosen to travel with them across that time. One’s own bookshelves are a living archive of who we have been, who we have longed to become, and who we may yet be. The books half-finished or cherished, the books read in the happy moments, the books purchased when we needed a lift. Unlike the tidy impersonality of the public library, the personal library is unruly, inconsistent, and idiosyncratic, its shape dictated less by the systemising logic of the Dewey Decimal System than by the peculiarities of taste, impulse, and circumstance. My shelves–spread across my study at home and my office at the university–when I look at them honestly, resemble a layered self-portrait that is part map, part diary, part dream, and through which I can unmistakably recall key moments in my life. The books that have travelled with me not only capture what I know but also what I have avoided, forgotten, or left unresolved.

Books we keep are often less about what we have read than about what we intend to read or read again. The unread shelf is one of the most intimate mirrors of the mind because it reflects not accomplishment but aspiration. Umberto Eco called this the ‘antilibrary’: the space of books not yet opened, which serve as reminders of all that lies beyond the edge of our present knowing. In Japan, tsundoku is the habit of buying books for the joy of owning them rather than the intention of reading them. When I look at certain volumes—some of which I bought decades ago and still haven’t touched—I feel less guilt than possibility. They are placeholders for a moment that might arrive slowly, or not at all, but whose presence reassures me that my intellectual life is not finished, not fully determined.

Reordering a shelf is often a kind of reordering of thought. Five years ago, I moved into a new office on campus, and, in spite of my best intentions, I still haven’t organised my books like I would have wanted, but that is a project for my sabbatical. And at home, I am preparing to move to a new flat, so I have been spending a fair bit of time sorting through my collection, donating some, moving others to my office, or setting some free into the wild as a Book Fairy. I have moved so many times in adulthood that my collection of books at home is regularly evolving under the simple pressures of space and time, and I’ve had to develop a somewhat loose relationship with those books, knowing that, as with everything, I can’t hold on to them forever. This is the hidden power of the library as a mirror. Our bookshelves are a form of externalised cognition, a way of staging our fears and hopes outside the confines of the mind.

Letting go of books can be difficult because they also hold memory, intimacy, and attachment. Certain volumes are less significant for their content than for the personal histories they embody. I have books given to me by mentors who shaped my early studies, others still carrying the marginalia of my younger, more anxious self. Some are battered, underlined, dog-eared—too fragile to lend but too precious to part with. In their presence, I find a strange companionship. They are transitional objects in Winnicott’s sense: things we hold onto not only for what they teach but for how they carry fragments of relationship and selfhood. These books resist being reduced to anything except being a part of the texture of a life.

As I’m choosing what books to let go of, I recall that the gaps in our libraries are just as telling as the books that line our shelves. If a library is a mirror, it reflects not only presence but absence: the silences we keep, the topics we resist, the voices we have yet to admit. I sometimes notice that my shelves are thin on contemporary fiction, which says something about my longstanding attachment to modernism and its afterlives. Other omissions—books I once borrowed and never replaced, fields I always meant to explore but never did—speak of hesitation, avoidance, or perhaps simply the finitude of time. Jacques Derrida reminds us that every archive preserves by excluding, gathering by leaving out. Our private libraries enact this paradox: they are as revealing in what they omit as in what they display.

There is also something quietly resistant in the very existence of the personal library. In an age of Kindle files and algorithmic recommendations, a wall of physical books feels like a slow, analogue refusal of efficiency. Digital texts are searchable, portable, infinitely replicable, but they lack the unruly density of shelves. But the personal library allows for accidents and rediscoveries, for stumbling across what we had forgotten. I sometimes find myself pulling down a volume at random and finding exactly the thought I did not know I needed. The shelves resist the flatness of digital feeds, offering instead a landscape shaped by serendipity and memory.

Yet even in their solitude, libraries are relational. Our shelves testify not only to solitary identity but to the communities we belong to: friends who recommended titles, colleagues who insisted on ‘essential’ readings, teachers whose voices linger in the texts they assigned (the work of W.G. Sebald falls very much into this category for me, and even though I have copies of all of his works gifted to my by an early mention and although I know that one day I will turn to him with the awe he is so regularly afforded, I know that that time hasn’t quite yet come for me. But it will.).

Quite often, while working in my university office, a visitor pauses before my shelves and points out a title, sparking conversations that might never have arisen otherwise. In this sense, the private library is not wholly private; it is porous, extending outward into dialogue. My own work in groups—whether through coaching or the Artist’s Way Circle I’m running this autumn—often reminds me that what we read, and how we gather around reading, is never a solitary affair. Libraries mirror not only the mind but also the networks of relation that sustain it.

Curating a library, then, is less about control than about cultivating a conversation. Books speak to each other across time and genre, staging unexpected encounters. I love those moments when a novel resonates with a philosopher, or when a fragment of mystical writing suddenly illuminates a passage in Freud. The library, seen this way, is not a static repository but a living dialogue, a set of voices waiting to be overheard. To tend a library is to arrange the conditions under which these conversations might occur.

Ultimately, our personal libraries remind us that identity is always a work-in-progress. Just as we are never finished as thinkers or as people, our shelves are never truly complete. They change as we change, expanding, contracting, reordering, accumulating silences and rediscoveries. To stand before them is to confront not a finished self but a process of becoming. Perhaps this is why libraries are so comforting: they mirror back to us not perfection but movement, reminding us that our lives, like our shelves, are full of possibility still unfolding.

I feel this sense of unfolding strongly at the moment, as I move between projects—teaching, writing, coaching, and group facilitation. My shelves are in transition, just as I am. There are new books arriving on attachment and literature, old companions being re-read, volumes I suspect I will never get to but cannot quite let go of. It feels fitting that, at the same time, I am gathering others into shared explorations of creativity and practice. If you are curious about these conversations, you might want to join me for The Art of Creative Practice—a space where, much like our shelves, we bring together disparate influences and let them speak to one another.

To tend a private library is to tend to the life of the mind. But more than that, it is to honour the shifting textures of memory, aspiration, and relation that define who we are. As you look at your own shelves this week, you might pause to notice not only what they contain but what they reveal—about where you’ve been, where you are, and where you might yet be heading.

✨ Upcoming Workshop: Mindfulness for Creative Practice

Thursday 23 October, 7.30-9.00pm (UK time)

Step away from the noise and distractions of everyday life and reconnect with your creative practice. This 90-minute online workshop is designed for anyone who wants to explore mindfulness as a tool to enhance focus, deepen flow, and spark inspiration.

Drawing on principles from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), the workshop combines evidence-based mindfulness techniques with practical creative exercises. Together, we’ll explore how to:

  • Quiet the inner critic and reduce creative blocks
  • Build sustainable habits that nourish your practice
  • Harness attention and presence to enhance imagination
  • Connect with a supportive community of fellow creatives

Through a blend of guided exercises, reflective practices, and techniques you can return to again and again, you’ll discover how mindfulness can open new pathways into your creative life. Whether your medium is writing, painting, music, research, or design, these methods are adaptable to any form of creative work.

👉 Reserve your spot here

How I’m Reading 100 Books in 2024

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity, habits, intention, Observations

Reading has always been more than just a pastime for me — it’s my passion and my whole world. To misquote Barbie‘s Ken: my job is books. But perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the hustle and bustle of my day job as an English literature academic, the sheer joy of reading for pleasure has fallen by the wayside. In order to get back to the joys of simply reading for pleasure I have set myself a challenge to read 100 books in 2024.

I read a lot as it is, but as there is so much more out there that I want to consume and enjoy I am challenging myself to read a lot this year. Nearly twice as much as I read last year. And, just to be clear, the 100 books are those that I am reading for pleasure–not the many more books that I will also be reading just for work.

I’m feeling pretty confident that I can meet this challenge because I already have a lot of strategies that have always helped me read a huge amount for my job. While these tips and tricks have been helpful to me as an English academic over the years, this year I am repurposing them for my own benefit to make sure that I am reading the stuff that I want to read for pleasure this year.

Here are some tips on how you can read 100 books (or 52, or 25, or 12, or whatever!) in 2024:

  • Keeping a TBR List: In order to navigate all the fantastic books that you have in store for you, keeping track of your To-Be-Read (TBR) list is paramount. My strategy is to use Goodreads as a comprehensive tool to keep track of the books I want to read, am currently immersed in, and have completed. This not only simplifies the reading process, but also provides a rewarding visualisation of progress and turns the literary journey into a tangible adventure.
  • Multitasking the reading experience: The key to an enriching reading experience lies in variety and having several books on the go at once ensures flexibility: if I don’t like one book, there’s another waiting for me. As I take a cross-platform approach, I juggle between a printed book, a Kindle and an audiobook. This ensures that, whatever the mood or situation, I always have a literary companion at hand to transport me to other worlds.
  • Notes as a ritual of immersion: For a devoted bibliophile, reading goes beyond the act itself. It becomes an immersive ritual where you internalise the essence of each book. My simple note-taking system consists of underlining or highlighting key passages and then summarising the book in my Goodreads reviews to create a tangible connection with the material. It’s a practise that goes beyond just finishing a book; it’s about creating a record of what you’ve completed
  • Giving up the unappealing: One of the liberating facets of my reading challenge is that I allow myself the freedom to give up on a book after the first 50 pages if it doesn’t captivate me. Life is too short to force yourself through something that you don’t vibe with. This ensures that each book contributes to the pleasure of reading rather than becoming a chore.
  • Visibility and accountability: When you resolve to read a hundred books in a year, visibility becomes a powerful accountability tool. Platforms like Goodreads are no longer just personal logbooks, but become public statements of commitment. This visibility acts as a subtle motivator, a gentle reminder that the literary journey is shared and that milestones should be celebrated together.

For me the challenge of reading 100 books in one year is not just about sheer quantity, but about rediscovering the joy of reading for pleasure. You can track my progress and share your own reading adventures on Goodreads — a virtual place where fellow literature lovers come together to celebrate the magic of books!

In The Path of Mindful Living: A 21-Day Mindfulness Companion, I lead you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and show you how to bring mindfulness into your daily life. Readers of my blog can download the workbook and pullout charts for only £6.